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Tony Hinchcliffe’s Trump rally set had Tim Walz asking, “Who is that jackwad?” I’ll explain. [1]
['Luke Winkie', 'Ben Mathis-Lilley']
Date: 2024-10-28 22:07:07+00:00
Last night, millions of Americans became familiar with Tony Hinchcliffe, the Texas-based comedian who was one of the scheduled speakers at Donald Trump’s presidential gala at Madison Square Garden. Hinchcliffe brought his typical stand-up shtick to the pulpit and—after endorsing Trump—made a wildly racist joke equating Puerto Rico to “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” The punch line immediately made headlines across political media, spurring some out-of-character damage control from even the Trump campaign, and a wave of outrage and pro-Democrat messaging from the Latino community. But you might be wondering, as vice presidential candidate Tim Walz put it in a videotaped reaction afterward, “Who is that jackwad?” And how did he find himself onstage at a Trump rally in the first place? The answer is more complicated than you might think, so strap in.
I feel as if I’m going to regret asking this, but who is Tony Hinchcliffe?
He’s a stand-up comedian who got his start on the mid-2000s celebrity roast circuit, in which Comedy Central would invite a bunch of joke writers to chide B-listers like William Shatner and Flava Flav in front of an open bar. Hinchcliffe’s persona has always been fairly pugilistic and mean-spirited—again, he’s a roast comic at heart—so, naturally, he quickly made friends with kindred spirits like Joe Rogan and Jeff Ross, both of whom took him out on tour. Hinchcliffe was a fairly minor player in the anti-woke underground until 2020, when he relocated to Austin, Texas, and brought his weekly comedy show, Kill Tony, with him. Today the show has taken up residence at Rogan’s comedy club, the so-called Comedy Mothership, which has truly become something like a welfare program for midwit stand-ups testing out a thirsty anti-woke demeanor.
What’s the deal with Kill Tony?
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Have you ever been to a really bad open mic? Where it seems as if the only people stepping up to the stage are either hacks or psychopaths who’ve wandered in off the street? Kill Tony essentially functions as a showcase for this grim ritual. Performers at Kill Tony drop their name in a bucket, and if they’re called, they wander up to the stage and perform a one-minute set. All the while, Hinchcliffe and a panel of similarly minded cronies like Tim Dillon and Bert Kreischer sit onstage, ready to offer feedback—which, in typical roast-comic form, usually consists of a lot of jabs about a performer’s weight, race, disabilities, physical stature, and so on.
But is it funny? That doesn’t sound that funny.
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Look, man, I’m not going to stand here and tell you that I don’t occasionally spend an evening on YouTube scrolling through Kill Tony highlights. The way people bomb on this show is mesmerizing. You can literally hear a pin drop in the room when a set is going badly, and I am not enough of a moralist to claim that I never enjoy watching someone eat shit in public. (The alternative, when a young comic wins over an insanely hostile environment, can be pretty rewarding too.) There is an undeniable spectacle to the Kill Tony format, and I do understand why it took off.
How popular is this show?
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More popular than you could ever imagine, in a way that is representative of the complete fragmentation of our consumption habits. For instance: Earlier this year, Kill Tony sold out Madison Square Garden. It’s currently the 21st-most-popular podcast on Spotify. The visibility of appearing on the show—and doing well—can be a legitimate game changer for up-and-coming comedians. Longtime Texas comic Brian Gaar mentioned that joke writers are flocking to Austin and sleeping in their cars just to get a taste of the Hinchcliffe Bump. Pretty bleak! It’s wild that an open mic hosted by a roast comic of minor renown has managed to attain the same mystique as, like, a Saturday Night Live callback.
Has Hinchcliffe always made racist jokes, or is this new?
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Well, outside of Hinchcliffe’s desire to wade into hazardous territory—George Floyd, the Baltimore bridge collapse—with his jokes, there was an incident in 2021 when he called Asian American comic Peng Dang a racial slur, and slipped into a chiding, mock-Chinese accent. That was a big enough deal for Hinchcliffe to get dropped from his representation, and for Antone’s—the Austin venue that originally hosted Kill Tony—to evict the open mic from its weekly slot. Hinchcliffe never apologized for his behavior, opting instead to triple down on the idea that nobody is ever justified in their repulsion to anything offensive within the sacred confines of a comedy club. Case in point: In 2023 Hinchcliffe went on to insinuate that Dang was an operative of the Chinese Communist Party. Dang, meanwhile, has stated that he continues to receive harassment from Kill Tony fans to this day.
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So is that how he became aligned with MAGA forces? Like, out of canceled-guy grievance?
Sure, something like that. It also can’t be reiterated enough that Hinchcliffe and Joe Rogan are longtime pals. There’s a whole network of MAGA-friendly comedians who all orbit around the immense publishing power of Rogan, and many of them have filtered into the Kill Tony universe. You know who’s a frequent panelist at the open mic? Shane Gillis, who was booted off Saturday Night Live for making some racist jokes of his own. So I’m not surprised that the Trump operation identified Hinchcliffe as an ally in its eternal quest to get young men to the polls.
And what did he say at the Trump rally, again?
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The exact quote was: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” He also made a joke about Black people carving watermelons instead of pumpkins for Halloween, an observation about as racist as it is hacky. It should also be said that Hinchcliffe bombed. Nobody in the room seemed to know who he was, nor were they won over by his panache. Ironically, the set felt a bit like someone tanking on Kill Tony.
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He certainly sounds like a Trump supporter to me.
You aren’t wrong. In some ways, nobody should be surprised that Hinchcliffe jumped at the opportunity to speak at yesterday’s rally. But I do think his appearance is going to have lasting effects on the Kill Tony brand. For years, Hinchcliffe has shielded himself with the excuse that everything he says—racial epithets, gay-bashing, garden-variety transphobia, whatever—should only ever be interpreted in the spirit of good humor. We, the pearl-clutching masses, simply cannot take a joke. That may give Hinchcliffe some plausible deniability when he is hosting an open mic, but when he’s warming up the crowd for Donald Trump—alongside a slew of MAGA agitators like Elon Musk and Stephen Miller—then that buffer is simply no longer present. Hinchcliffe is trashing Puerto Ricans in service of a presidential candidate who, later in the evening, would promise the largest-scale deportation campaign in American history. All the walls have come tumbling down.
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It’s hilarious that Hinchcliffe appears to be the last person to understand this. After his set, he went on X and complained that Walz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who were filmed reacting to the joke, “have no sense of humor.” Buddy, this isn’t Friday night at the Comedy Cellar! An election is in eight days! Hinchcliffe desires a world where nobody is allowed to be mad at him, no matter how insulting or unfunny his material is. He resembles the archetypical MAGA guy, in that he is both extremely emboldened and uniquely thin-skinned, and you could say he found a candidate who perfectly mirrored his worldview.
How have Trump and his team responded to Hinchcliffe’s set?
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They seem to be furious! It’s actually kind of suspicious. Trump never apologizes about anything, ever. It’s a defining feature of both his campaign strategy and overall psychological makeup. And yet, as Hinchcliffe’s Puerto Rico comments have made the rounds, a shocking number of Republicans have admonished him. Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said the joke “does not reflect the views” of the former president, while some Florida GOPers—clearly spooked by the potential fallout—went much further. Sen. Rick Scott asserted that he will “always do” whatever he can to “help Puerto Rico,” while Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez said it was “completely classless and in poor taste.” It is really quite something to watch the Republicans embrace the language of the Snowflakes, but in a razor-thin race that might teeter on the Latino vote, the MAGA contingency is in full-court press.
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Wait, so do you think Tony Hinchcliffe, of all people, could actually tilt the election?
OK, there’s a strong chance that the whole election once again comes down to Pennsylvania, which also happens to be home to one of the highest populations of Puerto Ricans in the United States, comprising about 8 percent of the state’s residents. After Hinchcliffe’s joke went nuclear, some of the most influential voices in the Puerto Rican community—Bad Bunny in particular—responded by showing their support for Harris. That has to mean something, right? At the very least, we can all agree that if Tony Hinchcliffe did unwittingly tip the election for Kamala, it would be, by far, the funniest thing he’s ever done.
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[1] Url:
https://slate.com/culture/2024/10/tony-hinchcliffe-trump-rally-puerto-rico-joke-msg.html
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