In Defense of Tony Hinchcliffe
Spoiler alert: in that joke, “Why did the chicken cross the road?,” neither a chicken nor a road existed. The imagination of the guy who made it up did. It was a joke, after all.
At Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Tony Hinchcliffe talked of his mom, an Ohio resident, eating cats and dogs in the wake of the influx of Haitian immigrants. He pondered Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, becoming the next O.J. Simpson. He described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
It sparked the official, non-samizdat media to finally recognize Tony Hinchcliffe’s existence. The New York Times, for example, claimed in one article that Hinchcliffe “may not be widely known” while in another called him a “popular” comedian. And in fake-news fashion, so many journalists pretended as though they do not know the difference between a joke and reality — and, worse still, that Hinchcliffe does not either.
An MSNBC headline informed, “Tony Hinchcliffe is part of the right’s humor-to-hate machine.” Swifties, Puerto Ricans, Republicans, Democrats, and dog-eaters took to Twitter to — what else? — complain. Tim Walz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez interrupted a day of playing video games to critique the performance; the former called him a “jackwad” while the latter described him as an “A-hole” (saying it as spelled) and labeled his routine “super upsetting.”
Our own Dov Fischer joined the pig pile. Scott McKay hear-hear’d him here.
“I guess if the comedian were a top headliner, that could make sense,” Fischer wrote of Hinchcliffe’s appearance. “Instead, they got some podcaster named Tony Hinchcliffe.”
Some podcaster, huh?
Hinchcliffe’s Kill Tony seat-kill sold out Madison Square Garden twice this summer. He stole the show at the roast of Tom Brady, the most-watched program on Netflix this year. His YouTube page boasts 376 million views — for context, more than double the number viewers of the YouTube page of the president of the United States.
Hinchcliffe sounds like he’s not Fischer’s bag. That’s fair (Jerry Lewis is not mine). But it seems unfair to dismiss arguably the hottest comedian in the United States as not a “top headliner.” He gets it right in regarding this type of comedy as a bad fit for a political rally (most good comedy is bad politics). He gets it right in placing the blame primarily on Donald Trump’s people for inviting an insult comic to a campaign event (maybe invite a peckish Siberian tiger next time and see what happens). And he grasps something in comparing Hinchcliffe, albeit unfavorably, to Don Rickles (Exhibit A that Hinchcliffe roasts better). But Fischer and Hinchcliffe’s other critics miss who he really takes after in a much more important way: Johnny Carson.
The Tonight Show once catapulted struggling comedians to success. Political correctness and a celebrity obsession nudged comedians if not off that show then toward its periphery. Kill Tony filled the void created once late-night programs featured fewer up-and-coming standups and Saturday Night Live seemingly attached political litmus tests to new hires. One could glean the impression from such programs that the younger generation lacks a sense of humor or that woke hysteria destroyed comedy. Kill Tony quickly disabuses viewers of such mistaken notions. This man platformed a type of comedy (the funny kind) deplatformed from network television. If you laugh, you love him for this.
Stars created by Kill Tony include bespectacled Belgium stick-figure Ric Diez, whose first joke out of the gate involved his reaction to the microphone stand. “Oh, wow!” he meekly exclaimed. “A statue of me.”
Diez’s rival, Hans Kim, went from an unknown to a hot nightclub and theater attraction because of Kill Tony. “A lot of people make fun of Asians because we like to eat dogs, which I understand is very shocking because in America, dogs are treated like family members,” he observed. “But in Asia, we treat our family members like family members.”
“In ’hood monopoly,” David Lucas explained, “every space is: go to jail.” The game pieces, he noted, include a Chuck Taylor, a pit bull, and a Cadillac with a spare tire. Nobody gets to buy Atlantic Avenue or Park Place — they can only rent.
Most of the names pulled from a bucket for a chance at 60 seconds of comedy do not “kill” Tony but instead bomb. It at times recalls The Gong Show or Make Me Laugh. Sometimes Hinchcliffe and the panel of celebrities and comedians laugh at rather than with the wannabes, which helps explain Fischer’s assessment: “This guy is genuinely vicious and hurtful.”
If that were so, then why does everybody leave his shows smiling? Are so many people really sadists? Kill Tony clearly runs as an entrepreneurial enterprise, but not to a degree that altruistic motivations, or outcomes, do not come into play. Leave aside the happy audience. Dreams come true on the stage. And, for whatever reason (pain brings a sort of gallow’s humor?), some of the funniest comedians showcased on the series endure debilitating diseases.
Ahren Belisle suffers from cerebral palsy. He can’t talk. Yet the mute Canadian somehow parlayed his Kill Tony spots to a run on America’s Got Talent. Fiona Cauley, a standup comedian who cannot stand up due to Friedrich’s ataxia, calls herself “a big ramp enthusiast” in using her condition for comedic effect. Martin Phillips generally forgoes jokes about his muscular dystrophy and instead explores such topics as how monstrous Big Bird appears to his kind and how Texans pay a lot of money to look gay.
The currency of Kill Tony is funny. Nobody laughs at Phillips, Cauley, or Belisle’s routine out of sympathy or solidarity. They laugh because they are funny. Where else but Kill Tony would their talents have received such exposure? So, even if one dislikes Hinchcliffe’s brand of insult humor, his primary significance comes not in his own comedy but in exposing tens of millions of people to other deserving comics — comics who care about laughter and not striking the right ideological tone — otherwise toiling in obscurity at comedy night at the local Holiday Inn bar.
“There was a fellow by the name of Casey Rocket,” a previously depressed attendee at the Forum Kill Tony show in Los Angeles told an interviewer. “He made me laugh so hard for about seven minutes I forgot I was sad, I almost peed my pants, I couldn’t breathe. I realized the power of comedy. It’s more than just jokes, you’re changing lives out there, you’re changing the chemical balance of people’s brains.”
It would be terrible if Tony Hinchcliffe’s jokes at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden event hurt Republican electoral outcomes. It would be worse if political concerns hurt comedy more than they already have.
Cutting the top marginal rate from 37 percent to 35 percent matters. It does not matter as much as laughter.
Some things are more important than politics.
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