Comedy News Roundup: July 26, 2026

The Trump-run Kennedy Center cut this Whitney Cummings joke out of its Netflix broadcast of the Mark Twain Prize ceremony: “I actually heard Trump may have even wanted to come tonight, but he couldn’t make it — he got caught in sex traffic.” 

Cummings announced the news in her podcast last week, clarifying that the decision came from the Kennedy Center rather than from Netflix. “This is the only time that you shouldn’t get censored,” the Riyadh Comedy Festival headliner explained, “because it is about comedians using humor to criticize our elected officials.” 

It’s nice to see various esteemed publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, Variety, and Deadline report on Cummings’ podcast. I only wish they mentioned the second part of her podcast, where she speculates that the shutdown of the Large Hadron Collider (which she seems to have just recently learned about) is causing women to have multiple periods. 

Weird Al Yankovic—sorry, “Weird Al” Yankovich—revealed in an interview with Pennsylvania news outlet TribLive that he turned down a seven-figure sum to perform at the Riyadh Comedy Festival:

I was invited to the Riyadh Comedy Festival (in Saudi Arabia), which is something that I obviously did not want to do. They offered me, I’m not going to say how much, but it was seven figures to do one show, which is way more than I’ve ever been offered in my life to do a show. But I just couldn’t be part of that. I’m not dissing anybody that took the money because I’m sure everybody that went there got a lot of money. I’m sure they had their own reasons and justifications for doing it. But I’m doing enough that I don’t need to take any amount of money if it makes me feel icky, and that kind of did.

With great respect and appreciation for Weird Al, a rare Comedian of Principle: diss them! Every single headliner got a lot of money and their justifications were bullshit. They don’t need your charity; they’re already rich. 

Rory Scovel fans, rejoice: his new Netflix special premieres next month. 

Forget The Odyssey: Comedian and homeowner Matt Rife announced his new celebrity cruise, “Suite Rife on Deck,” sailing from Miami to Grand Turk in February 2027. The cruise will feature “infinite activities,” he told his fans in an Instagram post, like a talent show and an “all-star comedians basketball game.” The roster of other all-star comedians on the ship includes Chris D’Elia’s friend Erik Griffin and billionaire Strauss Zelnick’s son Lukas. 

If you can’t wait until February to get your cruise on, don’t worry: Bert Kreischer’s “Fully Loaded at Sea” cruise departs Miami for Cozumel on November 19th, featuring Whitney Cummings, Big Jay Oakerson, Joe DeRosa, and Ian Fidance. With tickets starting at $1,315, you’d be stupid not to go.

I found much to enjoy in this virtual roundtable on the anti-woke vibe shift over at RiffPost, a new newsletter by internet culture writer Nick Catucci. For instance, I thought this was a particularly lucid answer from Parker Molloy to the question, “Looking back, was ‘cancel culture’ a genuine problem? Is it less of a problem now?”

Parker Molloy: Yeah, it was real. But people remember it wrong. The late-2010s version was basically what you get when you run boycott politics through social media, which nobody had really done at that scale before. And the problem was the reaction to it. Companies and executives had no clue how to handle a pile of angry posts, so they’d panic and do something stupid. Remember when Disney fired James Gunn off Guardians of the Galaxy because Mike Cernovich dug up a bunch of gross jokes he’d tweeted years before? They just … did it, right away, because a few accounts were mad. Insane. And that never went away. If anything the right got a lot better at it, because they can get elected officials and Fox to amplify whatever the outrage of the week is.

Nobody ever brings up Dylan Mulvaney in these conversations, and she might be the clearest actual “cancellation” there is. She didn’t do anything except be trans and take a one-off sponsorship. Bud Light sent her a personalized can, she posted about it once, and the right melted down for a year over it. Ron DeSantis had the state of Florida look into whether Anheuser-Busch breached its fiduciary duty to shareholders just by working with her. An actual governor, aiming an actual pension fund at a beer ad! And not one of the “free speech” people said a word. They’ve only ever cared about this issue in the sense that they want to be the ones who decide who gets “canceled” and what the culture looks like more broadly. And they’re very good at using this stuff when it points the direction they like.

And I muttered “yes… yes!” at this sequence of responses to a question about the general redpilling of public discourse:

Manny Fidel: The tenor of our discourse is definitely more abrasive. I think it has to do with the feeling people on the left have about “fighting back.” If there’s an ongoing cultural tug-of-war, we won’t gain any more ground by being chillers.

Kat Tenbarge: Anti-Israel sentiment is a huge driver of this next phase of politics and culture, and rightfully so, but legitimate Nazis like Nick Fuentes are having a field day with it. People need to be careful not to let actual bigots into the fold. Anti-AI sentiment is slowly getting captured by the right, too. But not the Trump right. The new right. Which is somehow even worse.

Scaachi Koul: You know, I don’t think any of this shit happens if you make sure people are paid a livable wage, that they have access to clean drinking water and health care, that they can marry who they want without fear of being murdered, that their children go to schools without cops and metal detectors as apparent necessities. The discourse is being shaped by what we’re afraid of, and we’re afraid of so much because it’s just so hard to have anything in this country. There are several bad actors making sure it stays hard, and using that fear to their advantage.

There’s always been money in improv—B2B improv, that is. Here’s the New York Times on Second City training professional athletes how to deal with journalists and serve as representatives for their own brands:

The players aren’t asked to do full-blown performances, but the exercises are broadly similar to Second City’s typical comedy training, including interactive exercises and improvisational word games. In one, players are paired off and asked to use the last word of their partner’s previous sentence as the first word of their response — an exercise that teaches them to listen.

“What they learn is that when a reporter is asking them a question, they can’t assume they know where it’s going and that they’ve heard it a million times, because it shows the journalist that you don’t care,” Jobin-Bevans said. Another exercise asks them to recite the alphabet and count to 26 at the same time — A1, B2, C3, and so on — which teaches them “that if you’re at your locker trying to change and you’re being asked a question, it’s hard to focus.”

In addition to preparing players how to deal with the news media, the program also aims to teach them about how to present themselves on social media platforms — skills honed with storytelling exercises like a game in which players are asked to tell a story in 60 seconds, then 30 seconds, then 10 seconds, paring down the information more and more to its essence each time.

“These athletes are about to become famous,” Kempf said. “They’re about to use their social media to promote their brand. It helps them to think about truly connecting with an audience and telling a story the right way.”

Via Variety, an interesting perspective from Jake Johnson on the demise of traditional Hollywood compensation paradigms: 

People on the outside might think that you’re set for life because you were on “New Girl,” but you really didn’t receive much in the way of residuals from the show, even though it’s still being streamed by millions and millions of people. In an ideal world, the cast of “New Girl” would be raking it in from all its streaming deals.

The game has changed, but I think it’s all relative. None of us are hard up and you’re never going to see any of us on OnlyFans. We’ve all done well, but the old-world money of the restaurant owner on the show being like, “I just bought my third mansion,” that’s over. What I appreciate about this era is that currently I’m on “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed,” I’m on “Sunset P.I.” from Dan Goor and Luke Del Tridici, and me and Damon [Wayans Jr.] are doing “Cable Guy.” Back in the day, when I was on “New Girl” and wanted to do a movie, I’d have to ask, like, nine people permission, and the answer was mostly always, “We don’t know.”

So, yes, the residuals were bigger, but so were the contract restrictions. When people ask me, “Do you ever feel bad that you’re always connected to Nick Miller?” I’m like, “You guys are living in the ‘Happy Days’ era.” There is so much opportunity for work and so many jobs, so the fact that people will check out what I’m in because of [“New Girl”], is great. I don’t care if they say it’s “’The Dink’ starring Nick Miller” as long as people see it. We’re able to now do a podcast, fully independent, from our garages on Zoom that reaches millions of people. It’s like, what world are we living in, man! So, all that we’ve lost in residuals — which we did lose — we have gained in new ways to keep making shit.

I can’t blame Johnson for speaking to his own experience in an interview about his own experience, but it’s hard to see someone like him say "there is so much opportunity for work and so many jobs” and not want to shout: “yeah man, because you’re already famous!” 

Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias, fresh off receiving a paycheck from the Saudi royal family, just received the revived Just For Laughs festival’s “Generation Award,” per The Hollywood Reporter. In his acceptance speech, he cautioned younger comics not to do it for the money:

If I can leave you with anything, it’s do [comedy] because you love it. Don’t expect to be paid. If you’re looking to be paid, you’re doing it for the wrong reason. Do it because it makes you feel good to be onstage in front of people, making people smile, making people laugh, making people forget, making people feel good.

Elsewhere at JFL, former JFL president Bruce Hills received the JFL Legacy Tribute Award. Congratulations, Bruce Hills!  

Let’s check in with Theo Von real quick:

As Professor Hubert Farnsworth once said:

Oh, what the hell. Let’s check back in on Yannis too:

Did you miss this week’s episode of the Humorism Evening Podcast? Catch up here. I do think there'ss some interesting stuff in this episode about Dave Chappelle’s financial stake in Yondr (and Yondr more broadly). If you’ve been holding out on the podcast because you think it'll just retread what’s in the newsletter, hold out no further—there’s plenty of podcast-exclusive material.