Last week, WABC AM 77 in New York announced that disgraced shock-jock relic and gushing Nazi fan Anthony Cumia had returned to the radio in our nation’s most cosmopolitan city. Two months into this second Trump administration, it was just the latest example of media corporations across the board scrambling to placate the president and assure his unappeasable, permanently aggrieved supporters that they are seen, loved, and appreciated. The Cumia news came alongside a Netflix announcement that it had signed a three-special deal with comic Tony Hinchcliffe, most famous for his gig at the Trump Madison Square Garden rally where he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” The week before that, Shane Gillis hosted Saturday Night Live; in 2019, he’d been hired and fired by SNL’s producer Lorne Michaels before he’d even appeared in a sketch, as old podcasts surfaced where Gillis threw terms like “fucking chinks” and “white faggots” around.
There’s nothing new in this embrace of right-wing troll comedy; it’s a throwback to the shock radio world where Trump began his media career 30 years ago. In those heady days of “just kidding” racism, Don Imus’s radio show was even simulcast on liberal MSNBC. Back then, Imus could call reporter Howard Kurtz a “boner-nosed…beanie-wearing Jew boy,” and sum up PBS’s White House correspondent Gwen Ifill’s gig thusly: “They let the cleaning lady cover the White House,” and still book Bill Clinton or John McCain. Howard Stern, meanwhile, platformed Klan members and played a racist holiday song called “N——- Claus.” Then as now, Trump used that kind of humor to advance his interests. As his Atlantic City casino empire collapsed, Trump went on Imus to blame his failure on Native American–owned casinos, saying, “They don’t look like Indians to me.” Three decades later, he stopped his State of the Union address to call Senator Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.”
The resurgence of troll comedy reflects the postelection trend of chasing MAGA followers as the pop-cult demographic du jour. Despite Trump’s nonexistent mandate and razor-thin popular-vote victory, the The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times radically altered their editorial pages to avoid our vindictive president’s wrath and court his supporters—resulting in large-scale defections of subscribers. As the administration scours the halls of our federal government to remove any visible sign of diversity, MSNBC cleansed its prime-time lineup of non-white hosts—drawing outraged pushback from star anchor Rachel Maddow. The saddest grab for this imaginary MAGA cultural revolution has to be Amazon Prime promoting reruns of The Apprentice. Bezos and company have bet that the American people, after seeing the president all day on the news and reading his daily Truth Social micro-manifestos, will want to relax at day’s end binge-watching his old “reality-TV” show late into the night.
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So far, the marketing strategy of pandering to Trump and his liberal-media-hating base has not helped said liberal media much. It’s cost them subscribers and traffic, and left the erstwhile resistance-branded team at MSNBC starved for ratings. All of these media decision-makers have misread Trump’s 312–226 Electoral College win as a national vibe shift rather than the meager popular win that it was. The audience hasn’t changed—there’s no red wave remaking the basic contours of media programming. Nevertheless, MAGA appeasement lumbers on. California Governor Gavin Newsom fell for it, launching a new podcast this month with hardcore MAGA guests like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. It blew up on him—not in terms of ratings, mind you, more in the fashion of a Musk-designed SpaceX launch.
No, nothing much has changed. A little over 10 years ago, Anthony Cumia suicide-bombed one of the most successful radio shows in America, his own Opie and Anthony Show. After a night wandering Times Square like a Travis Bickle who lost his cab, he got into a physical altercation with a Black woman. He followed the incident up with a racist series of social media posts about it, which led to his losing his job. Since then, Cumia has faced domestic violence charges, shrinking platforms, and a desperate reach to extremists for more listeners. It’s hard to keep the “just jokes” veneer up while circulating photos of yourself with white supremacist Nick Fuentes and posting commentary like “White people all over the world really need to get 1930’s Germany kinda pissed at this point.” In June 2024, along with a photo of New York Senator Chuck Schumer grilling beef hamburgers, Cumia wrote, “Rumor has it 6,000,000 burgers were cooked that day.”
Without his old partner, Cumia’s a helpless, humorless bigot. No modern media move as bad as a Cumia resurrection could happen without the personal involvement of a billionaire. Enter WABC’s owner, John Catsimatidis, who made his billions founding Manhattan’s Red Apple grocery store chain. Like so many in our billionaire class, from Trump to Musk to Bezos, Catsimatidis bought into the media world to promote his business interests and politics—a surrogate outlet, no doubt, in the wake of his failed campaign for mayor of New York in 2013. Today, WABC’s daily programming is a Manhattan troll farm of MAGA all-stars. There’s The Stone Zone with Roger Stone; Brian Kilmeade’s post Fox and Friends show; the late Rush Limbaugh’s zombie sidekick Bo Snerdley; Mark Levin; Fox ogre-in-exile and assassination fanfic king Bill O’Reilly; and Catsimatidis’s own hour with former Fox star Rita Cosby, Cats & Cosby.
How’s it going? “Cats” spent the week following the Cumia announcement doing damage control for his Nazi-adjacent talent deal. “WABC will not allow him to say anything antisemitic,” Catsimatidis told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He said it was his understanding that Cumia’s contract barred him from antisemitic comments on WABC, which Catsimatidis declared was “the most pro-Jewish station in America.” He admitted he knew about and discussed Cumia’s posts with him, and then hired him anyway. According to JTA, all those posts are still up.
That week, Netflix topped WABC’s troll hire with a three-special deal announcement for Tony Hinchcliffe, whose “island of garbage” joke made him nationally famous. The last time anyone outside the phantom zone of podcaster fame heard of Hinchcliffe he was calling Peng Dang, an immigrant Asian comic who introduced him on-stage in Austin, “a filthy fucking chink.” In his half-joking, actually-not-really style, Hinchcliffe called his Texas audience “race traitors” for laughing at Deng’s jokes. Deng took to social media to go after Hinchcliffe. Like Cumia’s tweets, you can decide for yourself whether Hinchcliffe meant it or not (the full sets are here), but the more relevant calculation is that these trolls know there’s an anti-immigrant white nationalist audience out there, and they will happily pander to it.
Hinchcliffe is a roast comic, and can be seen doing less hateful versions of these jokes at the expense of Jewish comics like Jeff Ross and Black comics like Kevin Hart in the 2024 Netflix roast of Tom Brady. At a roast, none of it matters, because whatever Jew jokes or Black jokes a comic does, the other comics get to punch back. Nominally, they are friends, or at least get paid to laugh like they’re friends. It’s comedy’s version of pro-wrestling. Sure, somebody gets hit by a chair, but it’s not real, and too absurd to be taken seriously.
After Hinchcliffe’s Madison Square Garden star turn, suddenly woke Republicans lashed out at his Puerto Rico jokes, mainly because Latinos make up a desperately needed GOP demographic. “This joke bombed for a reason,” whined newly minted snowflake Senator Rick Scott of Florida. “It’s not funny and it’s not true. Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans!” Days later, a giggling Jon Stewart defended Hinchcliffe. “I find that guy very funny,” Stewart said. “Obviously, in retrospect, having a roast comedian come to a political rally a week before election day and roasting a key demographic…probably not the best decision by the campaign politically, but to be fair, the guy’s just really doing what he does.”
Stewart’s “the guy’s just doing what he does” apologia gets stretched pretty thin here. The MSG rally wasn’t a roast or a segment of Hinchcliffe’s podcast, Kill Tony. Trump’s team wanted to echo an American Nazi rally staged at the same venue in 1939. There was no Puerto Rican comic to answer him, so the outburst was more like the night Hinchcliffe backstabbed Peng Dang. They hired Hinchcliffe to whip up a hate rally. He took the gig to help Trump get elected. When you show up for a white nationalist rally, and you do white nationalist jokes, you tend to look like a white nationalist. That, too, is what Tony Hinchcliffe does.
Marc Maron saw it all very differently than Jon Stewart. “The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers,” he wrote the day after Hinchcliffe’s MSG set. “Whether or not they are self-serving or true believers in the new fascism is unimportant. They are of the movement…. They are part of the public face of a fascist political movement that seeks to destroy the democratic idea.”
Troll comedy has always been a seamless fit for fascism, something the musical Cabaret made clear back in 1966. In 1990, at the height of his own troll fame, Andrew “Dice” Clay also sold-out Madison Square Garden and filmed those shows for his concert movie, Dice Rules (1991). In Roger Ebert’s review, he called out troll comedy’s fascist vibe: “It is eerie, watching the shots of the audience. You never see anyone just plain laughing, as if they’d heard something that was funny. You see, instead, behavior more appropriate at a fascist rally, as his fans stick their fists in the air and chant his name as if he were making some kind of statement for them. Perhaps he is. Perhaps he is giving voice to their rage, fear, prejudice and hatred. They seem to cheer him because he is getting away with expressing the sick thoughts they don’t dare to say.” George Carlin echoed those thoughts on Larry King’s show, calling Clay’s comedy a “sharing of anger and rage.” Carlin also questioned whether Clay truly shared that anger and rage with his audience. Most likely, he didn’t—which is why it’s called trolling.
Shane Gillis mounted his second shot hosting SNL two weeks ago. Lorne Michaels’ invitations to Gillis look transparently motivated to boost SNL’s currency with the MAGA comedy base and spare the show the dreaded brand of “woke.” The notoriety of his firing from SNL skyrocketed Gillis’ career. It took off like he had been a cast member for five years. As a troll comic, he’s now a serious draw at arena venues. That success furnished the excuse for his first SNL hosting gig in February 2024, just as the campaign year began. Within weeks of that, Warner Bros. Discovery imported Bill Maher’s Real Time trollery for Friday night segments on the news channel MAGA loathes above all others, CNN.
Both of Gillis’ flop-sweat drenched monologues come across more like meandering podcast chatter than stand-up. Unlike other trolls, he seems genuinely uncomfortable with the rep he’s garnered. Despite the success it brought him, he does not revel in it. “If you don’t know who I am, please don’t Google that,” he said in his first SNL monologue, and it’s maybe the funniest thing he ever said on the show. Still, when his second monologue hit an awkward silence during a bit about how he needs to ask his girlfriends if they’ve ever had sex with Black men, he did what every bombing troll comic does—he blamed his “liberal” audience. Has he ever seen Colin Jost and Michael Che’s Weekend Update joke swaps? Their race-specific jokes are brutal, and they get hard laughs from that same “liberal” audience—but to get those laughs, they actually write jokes.
Yes, Trump’s return means it’s morning in America again for troll comedy. In a country as multicultural and diverse as ours, there will always haters, and there will always be comics to cater to them. But it’s also true that pandering to them eventually blows up in their faces. Troll legends like Imus, Cumia, and Andrew “Dice” Clay all got a huge career boosts from their “Am I offending you?” sneers. Like Trump, the Diceman sold out Madison Square Garden. If you want to see him this month, he’ll be at the Tarrytown Music Hall, in Tarrytown, NY. Troll comedy always collapses the same way—when people stop asking whether you mean it or not, because it just doesn’t matter.
