Comedy News Roundup: October 25, 2026
Ft. Reggie Watts, Joe DeRosa, Gianmarco Soresi, Maria Bamford, Sammy Obeid, and Yannis Pappas.
The comedian Reggie Watts, fresh off the Rolling Stone article exposing his abuse of his ex-girlfriend Katherine McCullough, who died by suicide in March, had an estate sale this weekend at his home in Silver Lake. The catalog included lamps, drones, a Herman Miller chair, a bondage kit, and, according to Megan Koester, near-empty bottles of lube, a taser, a used vibrator, and his ex’s possessions:
The content of these books lies in stark contrast to that of the books inside the home, collected by the home’s actual owner. Books inside the home bear titles like “The Love Prescription: 7 Days to More Intimacy, Connection and Joy” and “Windows 95 for Dummies.” Outside, in the tub, there are books about labor unions and ending policing and curing capitalism. A Thomas Pynchon novel holds a letter from the Carolina Music Academy, dated 2015. It’s addressed to Katherine. A Nabokov holds a check from a catering company in the amount of $153.62. Pay to the order of: Katherine. A note, addressed to “Dearest Kat,” reads, “I hope every single one of your ‘day’ dreams, B. day dreams, wish upon a star dreams and dreams for the future are realized.” It’s signed, with x’s and o’s, “Mommy.”
Apparently Watts was not content simply with rifling through McCullough’s iCloud account after her death, and without her family’s knowledge; now he’s pawning off her own belongings so he can… pay the lawyer he shares with Chris D’Elia, Armie Hammer, and Bryan Singer? Flee the country? “Hell,” writes Koester, “is not hot enough for this future landlord.” Indeed.
Over the last few weeks, a parade of comedians have taken to their podcasts to defend Shane Gillis against the ignominy of people criticizing his SNL monologue. The most common defense, trotted out by everyone from Tom Segura and Bert Kreischer to Sam Morril and Chris D’Elia, is that “women dress like whores” wasn’t a joke, it was the setup to the joke, which was Gillis in the background of so many TikToks, leering at all those women dressed like whores. To this I say: thank you, gentlemen, very helpful.
More interesting, by which I mean more revealing and/or funny, are the defenses offered by Joe DeRosa and Gianmarco Soresi. The former, a Legion of Skanks hanger-on who recently relocated to Austin, responded to the controversy by accusing his fellow comedians of treachery:
DeRosa: I’ve seen a lot of comedians with negative takes on Shane. Lot of comedians. And those are the people I'm going to speak to right now. And this is what I'll say. Hey, comedians: what was it, a week, two weeks ago? I saw a bunch of you calling for solidarity when it came to SiriusXM removing comedians from their rotation and therefore cutting off income streams to working comics. You called for solidarity, but the first chance you had, you guys piled on one of your own. The first chance you had, you turned back and piled on one of your own.
Gang, that's not how solidarity works. It works in both directions. You can't just believe in solidarity when it helps line your own pockets. It's that simple. And by the way, comics, aren't you embarrassed? Aren't you embarrassed to so shamefully hop on a bully bandwagon just to get a few clicks for yourself? Everybody, everybody, sadly, even comedians, God, they love a good pile on. And I use the word sadly when referring to comics that do it because it is in fact literally the opposite of what a comedian is supposed to do, which is have a singular voice. It's embarrassing.
And for those of you that didn't make videos, I know you think you're safe, but we see the comments you're making. We see the little likes. We see the little reposts. It's gross. It's pathetic. And it is the literal opposite of solidarity.
I'm not surprised DeRosa has some misconceptions about solidarity, but I also just… don’t know who he’s talking about? Unless I missed something, it mostly wasn’t comedians piling on Gillis, it was celebrities outside of comedy, like Dan Levy. To the extent that standups or standup-adjacent folks jumped in, it was by posting pictures of themselves at the gym or calling Gillis a “stupid fucking cunt” on SNL UK. I suppose DeRosa could be talking about Phoebe Robinson and Michael Che—the former called Gillis a misogynist hack, the latter hilariously dodged questions about him on Today—but that’s just two people, neither of whom participated in the SiriusXM callout. No, the conversation within comedy was overwhelmingly pro-Gillis, because Gillis’s faction dominates pretty much any conversation within comedy. And yet, as DeRosa’s reaction shows, they still can’t help but perceive criticism as intrinsically bad faith.
See also: Gianmarco Soresi, the left-wing comic who has been an outspoken critic of Theo Von, Andrew Schulz, Joe Rogan, and the broader anti-woke crowd, calling them propagandists and sellouts. He seems to have a soft spot for Gillis, who, he argued earlier this month, was the target of unfair, performative backlash:
Soresi: Russell, you ignorant slut. Here's what I will say first and foremost. SNL is not some progressive platform when it comes to gender norms or misogyny. There is a degree of like, what did you think this show was? I mean, per my quote, “Jane, you ignorant slut.” That's one of the classic SNL lines. There just is a degree of this level of surprise that SNL would make a misogynistic joke, period. There's just kind of a shock and awe that the show that had Donald Trump host a couple years before Elon Musk hosted, a couple years after there was a Lindsay Lohan sketch where the premise was over summer break, Hermione's tits really grew and everyone was checking out her tits. That there's just kind of a like, “Oh my God, I can't believe the show organized and run by an 80-year-old multi-almost-billionaire was a little bit misogynistic now and then.”
There's a certain degree of, and I didn't discover this on my own, but I've seen online, that Dan Levy, whose father was one of the stars of American Pie, which I would argue has done more to contribute to misogyny in the last couple decades than anything in the world to hyper-fixate on this one moment. It feels performative to hyper-fixate on this guy that everyone wants to talk about every single time. How many times do we have to talk about this guy, this one guy, this one comedian? That's how it feels where it goes like, oh, once again, another, another. It's just like a cycle.
When Soresi’s cohost, Russell Daniels, pointed out that the context of the Cornell 7 case made Gillis’s joke feel especially charged, Soresi responded that the backlash was still unfair. “It feels like I am seeing as much about this joke on the socials as was spoken about the Cornell 7,” he said. “There's just a degree of if everything has a level of this over-heightened importance, there's never any moment that you get to go, ‘Hey, let's take something seriously.’ That's the problem.”
These defenses strike me as of a piece with DeRosa’s: so completely nonsensical that you can only conclude they’re driven by emotion rather than reason. Obviously misogynistic jokes are condemnable even when they appear on a show with a history of misogyny, just as racist or homophobic jokes would be. Obviously Dan Levy isn’t answerable for his father’s choices, and this argument—that American Pie was such a great contributor to misogyny—anyway concedes that misogynistic humor advances the cause of misogyny. I also have to laugh whenever comedians accuse people of being performative, because, well, that’s your whole job! Few are better equipped to understand that performance can be good or bad, truthful or fraudulent; like everything, it’s in the details, and in this case the details are people performing outrage over a famous comedian telling a sexist joke on national TV. It’s hard to see what’s wrong with that.
If you, like me, enjoy Soresi’s comedy and his ruthlessness towards the Rogan crowd, you may be wondering what his deal is here. I think part of it is simply that he likes Gillis, whom he described as “one of the best doing it” back before the latter’s first SNL hosting gig, but there may also be a mote of defensiveness over his own comedy:
Soresi: It's just there's a certain degree of performativeness where you go, "I don't think this one thing is as big a deal as you're making it." There just is this thing with comedy specifically that people want to hyper fixate on what was ultimately just a mid set and the word “whore.” And I guess the reason I like... There's a certain degree where it's like, “We gotta stop saying 'whore' and ‘bitch.’” And then I hear that and I go, “Uh-oh, I don't have any jokes with 'whore' in it, but I just filmed a special that says 'bitch' a number of times.” So I go, “First they came for 'whore,' and I said nothing, for I don't use the word 'whore' in my comedy. And then they came for ‘bitch' and none of the bitches backed me up.”
It’s a common feint in conversations like these: framing critics as upset over a single word rather than the overall meaning of a joke. Comedy fans aren’t tiny babies laughing at funny noises and silly faces; they actually do perceive a comedian’s ideas. Ironically, when comics whine that outraged audiences are taking some joke or another out of context, they’re usually the ones doing just that. Their real problem is that audiences refuse to indulge the comics' fantasy of “joke” as a context that obliterates all others. Here I will defer to Soresi's fans, who responded to his complaints very eloquently in the comments section:
Shahana Yasmin
In actual cancel culture news, the Palestinian-American comedian Sammy Obeid was detained in Japan, questioned, and ultimately denied entry to the country, where he was scheduled to perform two shows. Officials said he didn’t have the right visa; on Instagram, Obeid said he felt targeted: “Whether just flagged as suspicious which turned into them finding a reason for me to leave OR if they knew in advance that I was coming and were waiting to do this. I just know it wasn’t random.”
Ava Kofman
I haven’t watched Judd Apatow’s new Netflix documentary about Maria Bamford yet, but I loved her interview in the New Yorker today, especially her comments on pay transparency and comedy’s unreformed sex predators:
Were there parts of this documentary that felt like “The Comedians of Comedy” in the sense that you were, like, “That’s an imposed story line”? I don’t mean in a bad way, but which parts, if any, felt more like reality TV to you?
I don’t know. What I kept pitching to them was, “This should be all about financial literacy and finding out what everybody’s making.” What Judd is making, what the cameraman is making, what the restaurant we’re shooting at illegally and not asking permission from is not making. . . . I find that super fascinating.
[…]
I just shot something else, with a company called Blonde Medicine, and it’s all about open-book accounting. So I tell everyone what I’m being paid. I was paid three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a Netflix special. It’s the most I’ve ever been paid for a Netflix special, and I was, like, “Oh, hey, how much is the opener being paid?” And they said, “Five hundred bucks.” And I’m, like, “Oh, well, O.K., I think I’m going to hand her five grand.” [Netflix did not respond to a request for comment.]
You’re making a standup special about open-book accounting?
It’s sort of an obsession, because it isn’t spoken about. At all.
And it’s a comedy?
It’s a comedy.
[…]
You have permission in standup comedy to talk about things that you might not be able to talk about in other settings.
There are comics out there who are currently touring who have been accused of sexual assault, and nothing is really being done, especially by the comedians themselves. Like, they don’t say, “Hey, I actually went through a program. Here’s what I’m doing as a living amends by giving a million dollars to each of these people whose life I affected.” There’s none of that. I feel sad about the comedy community, because these guys are still working clubs, and no one’s protected who’s working there, at least as far as I can tell.
Yes! Yes!!
5. Until next time, please enjoy one minute and thirty seconds of the comedian Yannis Pappas arguing with Grok about the Shroud of Turin:
