Comedy News Roundup: November 8, 2026

This week in comedians being nazis, the white nationalist Tim Dillon opined in his free and paywalled election postmortems that the GOP would not have suffered such a historic loss if the Trump administration had adopted a different strategy towards immigrants: instead of dispatching ICE to terrorize communities by seizing grandmothers off the streets, thereby losing the crucial Latino vote, the Trump administration should simply have set about deporting the 10 million migrants who entered the country under Biden, prioritizing criminals and people with invalid asylum claims and hiring judges to expedite their removals. 

That Dillon would present this as a pragmatic solution may be funnier than any joke he’s ever told. Deporting 10 million people in four years would come out to nearly 7,000 deportations per day, with hundreds of thousands detained and judicial bottlenecks that would stretch out the process well past a single presidential term, to disastrous economic consequences. (The proposal also reveals his susceptibility to right-wing propaganda: the actual number of migrants who came under Biden and stayed is likely much smaller than 10 million.) The sheer level of mobilization required by such a policy would far outstrip any comparable removal effort in American history. And this, Dillon suggests, would not alienate Latino communities come election season. Then again, given his belief that immigrants are replacing white voters, maybe that’s the whole point.

This week in comedians being Islamophobes, Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost had this to say about Abdul El-Sayed’s refusal to support Chuck Schumer as Senate Majority Leader: “If I had just gone through the campaign he did, I don't think my first move would be, ‘Get rid of the Jewish guy.’”

If you’re getting whiplash hearing that joke one week after Michael Che criticized Israel’s genocide in Gaza—prompting a chorus of bad-faith commentators accused him of antisemitism—then let me remind you that Lorne Michaels considers it SNL’s job to have no opinion at all. In a 2024 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he said he no longer stands by his long-professed belief that the show must oppose the powerful; instead, he thinks it should just oppose everyone: “You can’t lecture the audience, which most of politics is now, people lecturing the audience. Ours is like, yeah, there are kind of idiots on both sides.” 

This week in right-wing cancel culture, conservative media is up in arms over the liberal podcast I’ve Had It, whose hosts, Jennifer Welch and Angie "Pumps" Sullivan," laughed at a tweet about the late Charlie Kirk in an episode discussing the midterms. (The tweet: “We’re digging up Charlie Kirk and doing it again.”) Several of the podcast’s sponsors have responded to the uproar by ending their partnerships. It may shock you to hear that some of those brands also sponsor podcasts hosted by right-wing comedians with a history of racist and/or homophobic and/or transphobic and/or misogynist remarks. For instance:

•The life insurance company Ethos has sponsored Theo Von, who said the n-word onstage in May, and Tim Dillon, who said in 2020 that he had “no love lost” for the “anarchists” killed by Kyle Rittenhouse.

•Ridge, the wallet brand, has sponsored Von, Dillon, unabashed white supremacist Dave Smith, and Tony Hinchcliffe, who cruelly joked about George Floyd at the Netflix Is a Joke Festival back in May. 

•ZipRecruiter has sponsored Von, Hinchcliffe, Shane “Haiti’s a fucking shithole” Gillis, Ari “I’m trying to bring ‘retarded’ back” Shaffir, and Joe “where do I even start” Rogan. 

I cannot claim to be surprised that the right only cares about “free speech” in comedy to the extent that it offers a license for bigotry, but I do have to wonder—can two still play at this game? Would these brands respond to pressure from the left, and how would right-wing podcasters respond if they did? I'd love to find out. 

This week in comedians being lazy, the right is also outraged over Dave Chappelle joking at Madison Square Garden last night that he feels better now that Charlie Kirk is dead. There’s a clip going around that contains what appears to be the beginning of the joke, or possibly the whole thing—given Chappelle’s unique comedic style of just sort of saying whatever, it’s hard to tell. In any case, what’s in the video appears to be a loosely revised version of the joke about Charlie Kirk in his most recent special, which he also began by observing that it’s hard to be a public figure. In that instance, he concluded that he was “shook” by the assassination; perhaps he’s had some time to process, or perhaps he’s just blindly pressing buttons. More interesting to me is that Chappelle very pointedly went onstage at the Riyadh Comedy Festival last year and said he had more free speech in Saudi Arabia than in the US, where people were getting punished for talking about Charlie Kirk. Does he have anything else to talk about?

This week in comedians being transphobes: I’m sorry, but I have to come back to Tim Dillon. Here he is, in his free episode yesterday, trying to make the case that the GOP leaned too hard into transphobia, then getting distracted by his own transphobia, ultimately concluding, I suppose, that the GOP should have been slightly less transphobic:

Dillon: The Republican platform was like, "Trans people are going to trans your children." And I think a lot of people started going, "Well, maybe they'd make some money. Maybe I want trans kids. Get a couple of bucks in here. Maybe I want a couple of tranny boom-bannies.” So I think people just economically are fucked and they're saying to themselves, "You know what? So what if my kids just become trans, maybe they'll get on Netflix. How about that? Get a fucking check in this house. My trans kid on Netflix? Good." But you know what it is? That's what people were selling. The Republicans were like, "They're gonna trans the kids." 

Maybe some of that was true. Some of that's probably true. My friend told me a story about a weird teacher named Moss who keeps telling the kids you can be whatever gender you want. [Ed note: ???] That’s crazy. No child in America should be given any options. They shouldn't be told that they can be whatever they want when they grow up, and they certainly shouldn't be told they can be whatever gender they want. Every child in America should be told by a very pragmatic and realistic teacher, there is a finite amount of options for you. [Ed. note: here is a periodic reminder that before Tim Dillon was a comedian, he sold subprime mortgages, including to himself.] Get realistic now. There is a small subset of things you can do and they're disappearing by the day. It should not be like, "You can be any gender you want and you can grow up to be the president and you can be anything you want, you can be an astronaut." It's like, "Hey, there were 30 jobs last year, now there's 15. And soon there's going to be eight." So kids shouldn't have all the options.

That being said, no one's afraid of trans people that much that they're like, “I don't know. I'm just going to buy all this food for a million dollars and eat it with my family and just keep a lookout for trans people who are coming into the house to trans the kids.” 

And I'm not for the trans stuff when they're children. I think it should be when they're older because then it's more fun. The child trans stuff I don't think is right. I think it should be when they're older. You gotta wait. You gotta make decisions when you're older, literally. I'm sorry. But no one's that afraid of their daughter—because Republicans are basically like, "What if your daughter's on a swim team and the swimmer that keeps winning keeps fucking hitting her in the head with a cock?" Sure, it's disturbing to think about, but at the end of the day, the food's too expensive. The gas is too expensive. People can't live.

Conspicuously missing from Dillon’s postmortems was any reflection on his own role in promoting the Trump campaign, helping the administration run interference on the Epstein scandal, fearmongering about trans people, and cheering on violent immigration enforcement tactics. The closest was when he astutely characterized JD Vance’s tendency to distance himself rhetorically from the administration:

Dillon: Here's the great thing that he does. What I like about him, he talks like he's not part of this. He always separates himself. He becomes a podcaster. When things go wrong, he immediately switches to a podcaster. He starts doing my job. Now, I'm not saying he was leading the charge on the war. In fact, I know for a fact, and it's been reported that he was a skeptic of the war, but he is part of the administration that went to war, which he's kind of supported. He's gone out and talked about, “Well, Trump's been very clear.” No, I get it. He could have resigned. He didn't. He's doing this. I get it. That being said, it is funny that when things don't go well, he becomes a podcaster. He switches from like, I'm an active member of the government to kind of an observer, and he did it with the Epstein files. 

So here again, “The reason we lost is the war. If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree? That's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost.” Yes. I agree with you. You are correct. That is why you lost. I like that. “The reason we lost.” Well, he's trying to now separate himself from Trump. He's trying to go, "Listen, hey guys, the reason we lost is this motherfucking war." 

It takes one to know one, eh?