The Hollywood Reporter divides comedy into SJW Empire and Alt-Right Rebels:
When Saturday Night Live fired Shane Gillis on Sept. 16 — just four days after he was cast as one of the latest Not Ready for Prime Time Players — the news was greeted with high-fives in much of the comedy community. Dana Gould tweeted that Gillis should strive to “be a better comic,” while Silicon Valley actor Jimmy O. Yang posted that Gillis deserved to go because he was “just plain racist.”
But not all comedians were rejoicing. On the contrary, the Gillis controversy — which began hours after his hiring, when podcasts surfaced of the 30-year-old Philadelphia comic calling presidential candidate Andrew Yang a “Jew chink” and spewing other racist and homophobic jokes — has become a flashpoint revealing a deep and widening rift in the comedy world. Like every other aspect of American life in the Trump era, stand-up is turning polarized, pitting comic against comic in an escalating civil war over what’s acceptable humor and what’s unfunny hate speech. “You millennials, you’re a bunch of rats, all of you,” Gillis defender Bill Burr snarled on David Spade’s Comedy Central show. “None of them cares. All they want to do is get people in trouble.”
If the pro-Gillis faction has a rebel base, it would be Gas Digital, a subscription streaming network (it charges $8.50 a month) based in New York’s East Village and catering to alt-right sensibilities — or what others see as envelope-pushing, “anything goes” comedy in the vein of Lenny Bruce or Sam Kinison. Gillis was a regular on its airwaves (it’s where he cracked his Andrew Yang jokes, as well as another in which he referred to Judd Apatow and actor Chris Gethard as “white faggot comics”).
Says Gas Digital co-founder Luis J. Gomez, “It’s funny, because when you said one side is very tolerant and inclusive, I was like, ‘Yes, that’s the side I’m on.’ ” Gomez, who co-hosts the service’s popular Legion of Skanks podcast (it tallies half a million downloads per episode), insists any characterization of his network as “alt-right” is wildly off base. “We are on the side of funny,” he says. “We’re just trying to create freely. I think when you get off Twitter and Reddit and YouTube, you find people who aren’t super sensitive about jokes.”
It’s amusing that they STILL don’t dare to mention the Big Bear’s name. It’s not authorized, you see. But any journalist who wants to schedule an interview with him or any other Unauthorized persona is more than welcome to contact our Public Relations Specialist, Pax Dickenson.