What's the matter? You can't take a joke?

The banality of Tony Hinchcliffe, MAGA'S newly crowned comedian in chief

I mean, it had the cadence of a joke, right? There was a set up, about how there’s a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean. Were that line not delivered by a professional comedian, I would have assumed that we were earnestly discussing an ecological catastrophe. But then the famous comedian paused, a cue that for whatever came next, I should be prepared to spit milk out of my nose. It was punchline time. The comedian looked so pleased with himself, like a kindergartener who just learned his first swear word and is about to try it out on Grandma. Are you ready? Oh man, sides are gonna be split…

“It’s called Puerto Rico.”

Get it, right? No no no, let me explain. The joke is that Puerto Rico is a garbage island. And, um, that’s not a good thing. Because all of that garbage reflects poorly on the residents of that island. Thank God that I’m smart and cool and understand this brand of deeply sophisticated humor. It’d be like if I got up on stage at Madison Square Garden and was like “Hey, um, did you hear that there’s like a really big toilet that’s, um, the shape of Rhode Island, and it’s right next to Massachusetts? It’s called Rhode Island.” What’s that? Not racist enough? I’ll keep working on it.

It’s such a bummer that there are “busy” Vice Presidential candidates who don’t get humor like myself and my guy Tony Hinchcliffe. You see what I did there? I put “busy” in quotes because sarcasm is also humor. I learned that one from Tony, the famous comedian whose humor you have to be really smart and cool to understand. Don’t mess with Tony, because he’s gonna roast ya’! Hey that reminds me, you know what Tim Walz uses? A tampon. Boom, another joke! That one’s about how Tim Walz wears tampons like a girl!

There was a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. This is the stage of the U.S. Presidential campaign where everything has devolved into a tasteless slurry of action and reaction, but this particular story seems to have broken through the din, for better or worse. By this point, you may have already been informed that the rally’s vibes were way too reminiscent of the time that Nazis packed that venue nearly a century ago. You have likely heard that a number of speakers made statements that were deliberately hurtful to Blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, immigrants in general, Jews, Palestinians, and women. Kamala Harris was called both a sex worker and the antichrist, a multi-hyphenate career of which I was previously unaware. You may have even heard pundits opine on the implications of the event on voters. What a fun wrinkle to American political discourse, that we discuss attacks on human beings as a function of their electoral impact rather than on the collective moral toll they’ve exacted (as an aside, how fortunate for the Puerto Rican diaspora that many of them live in critical states, such that their humanity can be situationally validated). 

If you heard about any of this, you are no doubt now familiar with Tony Hinchcliffe, the comic whose “edgy” set at the rally has been most roundly rebuffed from all quarters. Did you hear about how he also wanted to call the Vice President of the United States a “c***?” It’s not every day you get to use the phrase “cooler heads prevailed” in regards to the Trump campaign, but these are rarified times.

As a general rule, I don’t spend much time on the “listen to the terrible thing that Trump or a sycophant said” beat. It’s not that documentation of public misanthropy isn’t important, it’s just that I rarely see much value in being the eight hundredth left of center voice saying, essentially, that I too can identify that an awful statement was uttered from behind a dais. 

I do have something to say about Tony Hinchcliffe, though that wouldn’t have been the case earlier in the year. For the past two months, I’ve been consuming his comedy stylings on a near daily basis. We’ll get to the why, I promise. But first: Do you know the face Hinchcliffe makes when he’s about to deliver a particularly seething take-down? It’s a sneer, but the smuggest sneer you can imagine. I’ve now seen that sneer upwards of five hundred times. Every time, I feel a little bit smaller, which is precisely the point. I can confirm that he does, in fact, make fun of everybody. I can not confirm that any of his jokes have ever made me laugh, though if the comments below his Youtube videos are to be believed, that’s because I am a low-testosterone beta snowflake who is probably too busy brainstorming new pronouns and, I don’t know, grooming? It’s hard to keep track.

I’ve been spending time immersed in all things Tony Hinchcliffe for a project that may live here but may end up elsewhere. The long and the short of it is that Hinchcliffe is one particularly prominent star in a growing constellation of reactionary influencer bros (many of them orbiting around the Austin-based planet that is the Joe Rogan media empire). He is one of those anti-woke button pushers that the young fellas like, you see. I don’t understand any of those guys— Rogan, Andrew Tate, Dave Portnoy and the dozens of others who keep popping up like wildflowers. There are two Paul brothers, apparently. The kids love their knock-off Lunchables (a collaboration with Mr. Beast!).Prior to two months ago, I’d never watched any of their streams or listened to their podcasts, a vacuum in my cultural knowledge that I wanted to fill given their outsized influence.

A word, if I can, on projects like this. There has been no shortage of “what about the young men?” hand-wringing this election cycle. This isn’t surprising. My people- guys generally, and White guys specifically- live permanently at the center of everything. I don’t disagree with arguments that, during an election cycle that is defined by gender in so many ways, that it’s predictable and tiresome, that it’s my gender that once again to be at the center of the story.

I’m not convinced that guys (those guys, guys like me, any guys) need more understanding, mind you, but as somebody who wants to help build political movements that care for everybody and doesn’t want those efforts stymied by a demographic donut hole, it feels necessary to at least have a passing familiarity with the messages these guys are selling to millions of young (primarily, though not exclusively, White) men.

There’s another motivation, though. I have an eleven-year-old son and a seven-year-old daughter. Before I know it, both of them will be of the age where Tony Hinchcliffe and his ilk will be directly marketed to them. Even if Tony doesn’t end up being my son’s cup of tea, he will undoubtedly influence the boys that both he and my daughter grow up around. If patriarchy is like a smog, then Gen Z and Gen Alpha patriarchy is a vape cloud, a significant part of it emanating from Hinchcliffe’s general vicinity. 

All of this makes me sound like a terrified dad, a man out of time wondering what chance my family has of loving and being loved in the face of a rapidly metastasizing toxic rot. That’s accurate, by the way. Dead to rights. I know I won’t succeed in keeping internalized patriarchy away from my kids— Lord knows I keep discovering all of the ways I haven’t kept it at bay in myself— but damn am I motivated to try.

How’s my study abroad semester in the Manosphere going? Well, I’m a couple of months in and I’m ready to categorize the project as a predictably depressing thing that I am, in spite of it all, very glad to be doing. In order to better focus and not burn out, I’m mainlining just one young man influencer at a time, and, for fully arbitrary reasons, Hinchcliffe was first off the blocks. 

The Tony Hinchcliffe origin story begins in a working class section of Youngstown, Ohio. He was raised by a single mom. His dad was largely out of the picture. No need to play armchair psychologist. He’s already got that covered, remarking in a Variety profile that, “anytime my father…, would come around, my goal was to make him laugh because I thought that would make him visit more.” Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. He was a scared, hurt kid who discovered that he could inflate his own ego by making other people feel like crap. In the comedy arts, his canvass of choice has always been insults and roasts. Learning how to punch up, down and laterally was his ticket both to schoolyard popularity and to an eventual career, the latter thanks in part to patrons like Rogan and “Roastmaster” Jeff Ross. 

Hinchcliffe’s current claim to fame is his podcast, Kill Tony, which he hosts at Rogan’s Comedy Mothership club in Austin, Texas. Kill Tony’s big innovation is the bucket pull. Every show, unknown comics put their name in a bucket, hoping for the chance to perform a potentially star-making one minute set in front of Tony and a panel of established comics. Sometimes they struggle, sometimes they shine. In either case, after their minute is up, Tony and his buddies interview and roast the newbies. 

The less said about the comedy on Kill Tony, the better— not because it’s offensive, but because it’s hack. Have you heard about dating these days? It’s rough. And how about those various ethnic groups? They’re different from each other, but, like, not in a D.E.I. way. Powerful stuff. What is both fascinating and revealing, though, is the ritualistic dance between Tony and the lowly newbies. It’s three parts hazing, one part mentorship. While Hinchcliffe has talked at length about his passion for training and supporting young comics (the show’s title is a self-congratulatory reference to the ninja academies in the Kill Bill movies), to earn his support, they must run a gauntlet of taking it. If a comic struggles, they’re roasted mercilessly. If the comic has chops, they’re still roasted mercilessly, though with bursts of praise sprinkled in sporadically. Say, that reminds me, did you hear the one about Tony Hinchcliffe and his dad?

Near as I can tell, the easiest way for a comic to find success on Kill Tony is to zero in on their most obvious identity marker and, well, preemptively bully themselves. Black comics make jokes about how everything White people think about Black people is true (but also about how White people suck). Women make jokes about how women suck. Fat comics poke fun of their own weight, queer comics perform a 60 second gay panic on themselves, etc. etc. The show often welcomes comics with clear physical and/or intellectual disabilities, whose sets focus solely on those disabilities. Intersectionality abounds, but only as an opportunity to get in more jokes at your own expense. A Black lesbian? Tony’s listening, as long as you’re a cool Black lesbian who, you know, isn’t suddenly gonna go all cancel culture just because the boys are having a good time.

If you can take a joke, you’re cool. If you can’t, we hate you. 

Although the newbie comics are ostensibly the stars of Kill Tony, the show’s namesake host never cedes control. After each comic’s set, he repeats a few more “edgy” jokes about the clear phenotypic markers that have been presented for his amusement. No matter how predictable or un-joke-like the exchange, everybody gathered on stage— the panel, the nervous comic, the house band— erupts in laughter. The message is clear. Occasionally a bucket puller can run with the pack, but there’s a clear top dog. They’re allowed to make fun of Tony himself, but everybody defaults to the same joke. His voice is nasally, you see. That probably means he’s gay. Get it? For your own sake, you’d better say yes.

I started my mini Kill Tony project with a vague hypothesis that I was going to encounter something foreign to my Midwestern dad oeuvre. The only surprise, I suppose, has been how familiar all this is.

As a former teenage boy, Kill Tony isn’t complicated. It’s an express portal back to high school, a place where balls were busted inartfully but incessantly, where we didn’t know the difference between being trenchant and being cruel, but we did know that if you made fun of the kid who everybody assumed was gay, you’d be less likely to get called a f** yourself. High school, where “cool girls” didn’t get all worked up if the guys called them a b****, and where (in my mostly White Montana town at least) the few kids of color could gain acceptance by beating the White boys to the joke they knew was on the tip of their lips. 

Years later, I’ve reconnected with some of the guys from high school. There are a lot of regrets. Were we to do it over again, we would have offered each other a different life line.

It has been, quite frankly, heartbreaking to discover organically that the primary difference between then and now is that there’s more lucrative opportunities for middle aged men to build careers off of young men’s endless founts of insecurity. These days, it’s not just the guys in Senior hallways reminding boys to man up and just take the Goddamned joke. That’s a millionaire’s game now.

The point is, you haven’t missed the joke. There was no joke. There are never any jokes. There’s no skill in seeing a Black guy in the audience and saying he likes watermelon. There’s no skill in calling a Chinese guy a slur or testing out whether or not the ladies in the crowd are cool with rape jokes tonight. All it takes is the ability to lie to yourself, to pretend that this is an adequate substitute for what you’re really craving. You don’t need unconditional acceptance and people around you who see and love you. You don’t need a purpose, or a sense of agency. You exist merely to join a circular firing squad of guys who are too scared to be the first to say “why are we doing this to each other?”

The cruelty isn’t actually the point. At least not at first. We don’t start out life searching for opportunities to be cruel. Even teenage boys. Even young men. Even young straight guys, White guys, guys in a position to have our individual acts of cruelty amplified by hateful systems. We start out seeking to be loved and seen, and then we’re given an awful set of partial choices and bad faith mentors. People who should know better lie to us. People who do no better avoid us for their own safety and energy. And that doesn’t make us victims, nor does it exonerate our sins, but it is a shame. Everybody deserves a better mentor than the Tony Hinchcliffes of the world, himself included. His joke, as they say, isn’t funny anymore. But that won’t keep millions from tuning in, nor hundreds from driving down to Austin, sleeping in their cars, hoping that they can find a home on the other end of a bucket pull.

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End notes:

1. I’ve been really grateful for other writers and researchers who are thinking about this “young men” question in thoughtful and nuanced ways, somewhere between the poles of “young men deserve sympathy in a way that nobody else does” and “screw ‘em, they should just buck up.” Gratitude to

   Ruth Whippman
   (read Boymom!),
   Satya Doyle Byock
   (who has had a recent pair of essays on gender and masculinity that I can’t stop thinking about) and the folks at the
   Young Men Research Initiative
   .

2. This week’s book plug: As many readers have note, my memoir, The Right Kind of White is a book about race, but because it’s my story it’s also very much a story of boyhood and young manhood and how a kid who was very convinced that he was “one of the good ones” still fell into familiar patriarchal traps. I learned a lot from playing through it out loud, and have heard that other cis men (young and old) for whom it’s been really resonant and helpful.

3. Paid subscribers: If you missed it, in last week’s top five list/discussion, I officially launched the winter White Pages “send something nice” exchange. It’s gonna be super fun and you should join.

4. Speaking of becoming a White Pages subscriber, that’s a cool and helpful thing to do, because it means that this newsletter keeps existing.

5. A quick election week PSA for readers in the United States: We are in a time of frayed nerves and exhaustion. Probably a good time to both seek out and offer connection.

6. I signed onto this open letter (re: writers in solidarity with Gaza).

7. SONG OF THE WEEK! “Battle of Hampton Roads” by Titus Andronicus. These first three verses, man. Jeez.

The full Song of the Week playlist is available on both Apple Music andSpotify.