Check Out This Slate Feature On Kill Tony

There's a long and interesting feature in Slate today about Tony Hinchcliffe and his podcast Kill Tony, which over the last half-decade has somehow grown into one of the few remaining pathways to success in standup comedy: 

He Made a Joke So Racist Even Trump Rejected It. Now He’s the Most Powerful Comic in America.

Even I can no longer deny the radical power of Kill Tony.

SlateLuke Winkie

I have many disagreements with the article’s conclusions—in fact I think it’s bonkers the way it casts Kill Tony as some sort of coming-together of comedians across social and political strata, demonstrating comedy’s power to unite people regardless of ideology, when pretty much everyone it describes is a working-class right-winger eagerly prostrating themselves at the foot of a nakedly racist Trump supporter, honestly just one of the most disgusting sweaty try-hard unfunny motherfuckers working in entertainment today—but I’d like to chew on them awhile. And in spite of those disagreements I do think it provides a necessary and illuminating portrait of one of comedy’s worst institutions, an honest-to-goodness fascist humiliation ritual that sells out arenas and has a Netflix deal. 

Below are some passages that stood out to me; I’d love to hear what you think.

But unlike other comedians who’ve been admonished for a racist punch line, Hinchcliffe refused to ask for forgiveness from Dang. Instead, he doubled down. Two years later, talking about the backlash on the right-leaning YouTube podcast Triggernometry, Hinchcliffe referred to Dang as a “Chinese spy,” and facetiously speculated that the entire controversy was orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party.

“I knew that what I had done was not wrong. It wasn’t even the worst thing I did that week,” he would later add in an interview with Variety. “It was so dumbfounding to me because it was a joke, and my stance is that comedians should never apologize for a joke.”

[…]

This disruption can be disorienting to watch. One of the comedians vying for a spot on the Kill Tony bill was Juan Denmark, a 31-year-old who flew to Austin from Portland and had already appeared on the show twice before. Denmark is Black, and he had spent much of his time on Kill Tony joking about race in a deliberately boundary-pushing way. During his most recent minute, he commented that Asian people would have made for better slaves because you could fit “five times as many of those motherfuckers under that boat.”

The evening prior, I had caught Denmark’s set at the Creek and the Cave, a formerly New York–based club that relocated to the city after the lockdown, and, like the Mothership, now boasts a reputation for red-pilled comedy. It was a roast night: Patrons and fellow performers alike were given free rein to heckle anyone on stage, and were encouraged to do so with as much taboo-breaking velocity as possible. So, when Denmark was called to the mic, he gamely chuckled through the jabs that ricocheted across the room. Most of the jokes remained fairly tame. (Denmark was wearing denim overalls. One comic called him the “Super Mario Brotha.”) But toward the end of the set, a white woman in the corner of the room took the floor. “Let’s get back to basics,” she said. A moment later, she called Denmark a “fucking n—r.” Hard R. That was the entire punch line.

[…]

Other comics who signed up for the show relish the chance to be gawked at. Leaning against the balcony upstairs at Shakespeare’s was Karen Jones, a grandmother who told me that she has signed up for Kill Tony every week, except for the 90 days she was in jail. Why was Jones locked up? “Jan. 6,” she replied.

Jones had been on the show five times now, and it has transformed her into something of a folk hero in the Kill Tony universe. “People come up to get autographs a lot. It’s made me be able to laugh in the face of those who besmirched and defamed me,” she said. (She appreciates the pardon she received from Donald Trump, but won’t feel totally exonerated until, in her words, it comes to light that “Antifa” was behind Jan. 6.)

[…]

Leyla Ingalls, a 26-year-old from Ohio, has asked herself a similar question. She flexed an uncommonly wry delivery during her star-making set on Kill Tony. (“It’s like being one of those little green aliens from Toy Story getting pulled out by the claw machine,” she said, describing the sensation of getting selected for the show.) Ingalls doesn’t have any visible medical ailments. Instead, she’s shackled by something even more dangerous in this ecosystem: She is hot. The morning after her episode aired, she found herself with 40,000 Instagram followers, 98 percent of whom were men. Two weeks later, standing in an auto-body shop while a mechanic replaced all four of her blown-out tires, Ingalls received a phone call. It was the marketing team at OnlyFans. They offered her a contract to join the platform.

“I was broke as fuck. I literally had $50 to my name,” Ingalls told me. “They said, ‘OK, you’ll get eight grand,’ and I had to act like I wasn’t desperate.”

Ingalls’ stand-up career is flourishing. After breaking through on Kill Tony, she has been invited to headline clubs across the country—all while posting her jokes, and the occasional nude, on her OnlyFans account. The brush with sex work has made Ingalls a controversial figure among the chauvinistic alcoves of the show’s fandom, which, naturally, is composed of the men the Trump campaign hoped to court when it brought Hinchcliffe to that Madison Square Garden rally. Ingalls has endured a wave of abuse in her Instagram comments from young men emboldened by both Kill Tony’s accord with Trump and the show’s gleeful license to cross lines.

Wild, scary stuff.