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
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.
