EdgeBored
The Edgelord Bubble is About to Burst
I look at media, culture, politics and tech. I like to compare today’s media landscape with that of the past because time is cyclical and the past is prologue.
The Dark Knight was regarded as the greatest comic book film ever upon release. Warner Brothers, like any other film studio, couldn’t resist running a good thing into the ground. Besides squeezing out one more Christopher Nolan Batman film, they transformed all the DC superheroes into brooding, gritty versions of themselves, most infamously Superman. There was a zealous cult that worshiped at the new grimdark altar, but audiences preferred the quippy Marvel films. When the DC cinematic universe got rebooted last year with the new James Gunn Superman film, there was more humor, but also an earnestness and warmth that the Marvel films did not have. The dark age was over.
Meanwhile, it seems like everyone on the Internet this past decade was given notes by a hack director to emulate the Joker.
A facile understanding for the popularity of what Bob Odenkirk calls “manosphere comedy” (primarily comics from the Joe Rogan podcast universe including Theo Von, Bert Kreischer, Shane Gillis and Tony Hinchcliffe) is that it was a reaction to wokeness. Why wasn’t all of it more popular in 2019 then? Was America less woke then? The #resistance dominated Hollywood from 2017 to 2020, but Trump was also president, so any trolling the jokers did was diminished. Trump had the monopoly on crude, crass, cruel comedy. All other comedians of all genres were forced to focus at least some of their act on him. To ignore him was akin to ignoring a drunk heckler who won’t shut up; it could be done, but doing so made you an amateur comedian.
The Biden years had the reverse effect. Just like the Joker needs Batman, the podcast bros needed a powerful enemy and they got one in President Joe Biden (as Audrey Horne says here, Biden even made a great foil for the Dimes Square crowd). Neither Trump nor Biden directly involved themselves with these comics before 2024. The opposing force was the media bubble around Biden that attempted to shield any criticism of him before his disastrous debate performance in June 2024. I go more in depth here about how the media deflected all criticisms, but this excerpt should help elucidate this point:
Then the President fell off his bike. What would have been late night fodder for years if Trump or Bush did it was hardly a blip on the mainstream media’s radar. Conservatives latched on as expected, but so did the growing number of online leftists, upset not only with how Bernie Sanders got railroaded again in 2020, but with the unfair labor conditions of COVID (essential workers potentially risking their health to work onsite, with no boost in health benefits or wages), as well as with the President’s hawkish support of Ukraine. When the press gave more favorable coverage than expected to Dimes Square, you can’t help but wonder if it was their indirect, perhaps unconscious way of platforming voices that were critical of Biden.
The center-left media ignoring a Democrat President’s foibles was nothing new, but the increased awareness of this treatment was. Trump predictably sounded off about it in the press, but paradoxically Trump’s cultural influence out of office was greater than it was when he was in power. When he got kicked off Twitter in 2021, screenshots of his funniest tweets were shared all over social media and a quasi-ironic nostalgia for Crazy Papa Trump grew. I cannot think of any other political force who wasn’t in power but still garnered attention like this for the entire four years they were out of office.
With Trump’s outlaw status, being hounded by the media as he was out of office, and Biden’s relative lack of scrutiny, any outlets online that were critical of Biden exploded in popularity. This included dirtbag left podcasts like Chapo Trap house and Cum Town. Kill Tony, the Joe Rogan Experience, Flagrant 2, Bad Friends, 2 Bears 1 Cave and all the other satellite podcasts also satiated the appetite for those who were young and right-wing.
2024 was the year in which manosphere comedy had by far its greatest exposure but was also the beginning of the end. Joe Rogan, Theo Von and Andrew Schultz nabbed Trump as a guest. When Trump won, these podcasters were blamed. This attribution is exaggerated, but it can be said that they dug their own grave by throwing their weight behind any candidate. It is true that Barack Obama appeared on Between Two Ferns and WTF, but this was during his second term in office. Doug Benson wouldn’t have had a pipe dream of inviting Obama to play The Leonard Maltin Game on Doug Loves Movies in ‘08. What’s more, no comedians took group selfies at either of his inaugurations like Rogan and Von did at Trump’s. To say that this all hurt these edgelords may seem like wishful thinking. Gillis had three sold out nights at Madison Square Garden. Joe Rogan still has the #1 comedy podcast on Spotify and Apple. Worth remembering that Skid Row, Guns N’ Roses and Van Halen had incredible numbers in 1991, months before Nirvana hit.
Before I go any further let me say that this doesn’t necessarily mean these comedians themselves will sink or that their podcasts will wither. I am speaking of the edgelord aesthetic of needling libs for lulz. Might seem like a minor thing to chart the end of, until you realize this has been by a wide margin the only truly financially successful comedy of this decade.
OK now let’s go back to counting the canaries in the coal mine. In May, “The Roast of Kevin Hart” on Netflix dropped. It is easy to dismiss the backlash against the offensive roast jokes as standard knee-jerk liberal sensitivity; lord knows the flurry of self-righteously indignant editorials castigating them didn’t help. What made the Hart roast different had less to do with jokes about George Floyd or lynching and more to do with the relationship, or lack thereof, between comics like Gillis and Hinchcliffe, and Hart. This isn’t to say that comedians need to be Friar’s Club chums to roast each other. Most of the comics at the Comedy Central roast of William Shatner weren’t close friends of his, but they respected him. Even when the guest of honor isn’t widely loved, like Donald Trump at his own Comedy Central roast, the guest also isn’t a peer. Hart, perhaps out of a misguided sense of honor or selflessness, hired Hinchcliffe and Gillis because he wanted the best to roast him, regardless of whether they reciprocated his respect. I am not suggesting that the audience studied whether they shared the same love language, just that most people don’t remember seeing Kevin Hart palling around together with them on the same film or show like he has with, say, The Rock.
A month later, Tony Hinchcliffe’s Netflix comedy special “Man of the People” got negative attention not only by critics or comedy fans, but by fans of his own Kill Tony podcast. This underlines the root problem: edgelord comedy seems to survive in podcast or short video form, but struggles in a longer form like a special or a TV series. Shane Gillis’s Netflix sitcom “Tires” has been a success and its second season has been solid, but will it, or will any scripted comedy series, edgy or safe, be given a chance to find its footing with the ruthless data metrics of any streaming platform? As comedian Paul Scheer wrote in his exhaustively researched analysis of why no live-action TV comedies in the streaming era have reached 100 episodes (the number needed for syndication and, he convincingly argues, for an audience to truly appreciate a sitcom), newer shows will always have their numbers dwarfed by those of legacy sitcoms like “Seinfeld” or “The Office” because they have more episodes. Since the older shows had more than twice as many episodes per season (24 vs. 8), the problem will only get worse. It’s a shame, because “Tires” seems to be the best vehicle for Gillis’s talent. While it doesn’t dilute his edge, it does add a sweetness that is missing from his — from most — stand-up sets, let alone from audience takedown videos and freeform hang-out podcasts.
The hang-out podcasts itself has lost its vitality. A little more than a decade ago, podcasts were celebrated for their intimacy. No one knew this very relaxed atmosphere would prove to be its undoing. When The Nelk Boys had Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on, they found out he likes Burger King, haters be damned. The word was out: go on podcasts for softball questions and promote anything you want. Softball questions that were never used when a comedian did crowd work with an audience member of course.
You can call the years from 2016 to now The Roast Decade. In 2016, the Los Angeles roast battle scene, primarily centered around The Comedy Store, came into national prominence, being featured in The New York Times. Tony Hinchcliffe, host of the then-niche podcast Kill Tony, gained a reputation for his battling skills. That year, Jeff Ross hosted a roast battle series on Comedy Central. Also that year, Trump had turned presidential debates into roast battles, with all his opponents flailing. This entire decade has been one long roast war. Sassy clapbacks from drag queens getting shared on Huffington Post. Country stars leaving “Saturday Night Live” while flipping the bird.
In a roast war, it is hard to declare a victor. That’s not how they work: roast wars declare losers. And right now that loser is Trump. Dragging America into an unpopular war, sending ICE into battle in Minneapolis, the stench has gotten too great, to the point where even Republicans are starting to distance themselves. And if Republicans are, comedians definitely are. Only Hinchcliffe has avoided an about-face. Why would he? Rogan and Gillis’s mea culpas are not going to attract any new fans.
They all have a horde of enemies though, which makes this era of transgression different from the early ‘00s and the late ‘80s. Andrew “Dice” Clay and “Family Guy” were not liked by everyone, but their detractors weren’t making long takedown videos breaking down every single failed joke and bad idea they ever had. One amateur critic made a video compilation of every time Joe Rogan didn’t make another comedian laugh on his podcast. And it’s not just those who dislike their political affiliation. Kill Tony, a live stand-up comedy open mic where a comedian gets one minute, while giving opportunities to comics, has inadvertently but absolutely cheapened the art form of stand-up comedy. Inadvertently, in that the intention was to give new comedians a shot. But no other institution exists to help them. Late night TV has been a dead-end (before Trump, yes, though he has not helped); TV comedies are here today, gone tonight, comedy films are a 20th century phenomenon. Stand-up comedy itself has become one large open mic now. A crab bucket where you can’t climb up past one minute. The end of the edgelord bubble might well mean a stand-up comedy crash, just like Andrew “Dice” Clay’s decline ran parallel to the end of the ‘80s comedy boom.
There are other outposts of edgy comedy out there. “Fishtank” is a hit reality show that was created by Sam Hyde, former member of the sketch group Million Dollar Experiment (MDE) — a group that had its 2016 Adult Swim show canceled when Hyde was found to have links to alt-right groups. MDE were part of the post-alternative wave of comedy that included Chapo Trap House and Cum Town. Like the alternative comedians from 1990-2015 (Janeane Garofalo, David Cross, Eric Andre) these comedians were not conventional. But they were either too far right or too far left to be simply labeled “alt.”1
“Fishtank” certainly can’t be lumped in with the rest of the Roganverse. It may skew rightward, with its unedited racial slurs, but, much as I am not a Hyde fan or a “Fishtank” watcher, the show cannot be as easily handwaved. Cheap laughs are not the point. The premise of “Fishtank,” from the alarming Wired article:
“Fishtank” takes place in what its producers call a “fully monitored smart house”: a suburban home rigged up with dozens of CCTV cameras, microphones, and speakers. Each season, between six and 10 contestants—or “fish”—move into the home and battle for supremacy. They face off in elimination challenges and attempt to irritate each other into quitting. Last one remaining wins [...] Fans watch for hours each day and pay to interact with the cast in various ways. An ad for the show reads: “You live in the walls. You control the action.” Viewers can vote on popularity-based challenges, send gifts or advantages to the cast, or type messages that blare through the speakers in real time, like a comments section sprung to life. These messages are uncensored and composed, largely, of obscenities, slurs, and insults, anything to get under the cast’s skin. They often succeed, and the contestants’ antics—if you can call them that—dwarf the most startling behavior MTV, TLC, and Netflix have collectively cooked up over decades. Contestants have been known to strip naked, pour cups of piss on one another, scream slurs, and fistfight. They have smoked crack or meth (viewers couldn’t quite tell which), masturbated, attempted to smear feces on each other, worn blackface, and run directly into plate glass doors.
Seem like a long way to go to be shocking? Sure. But with the entire political and technocratic establishment being transgressive, it’s hard to stand out. That is the problem when transgression is in power; by nature rebels need something to rebel against. Now it seems, contrary to what I wrote back in December, the alt-left counterculture has found ways to shock without resorting to gay jokes. New York Times critic Jason Zinoman, interviewed in a Slate article, says the alt-clown movement has been doing just that:
“Comedy got a little cautious” in the 2010s, he told me. “Particularly progressive comedy. They ceded transgression to alt-right comedy clubs, and I think people forgot that transgression is a big part of what makes people laugh. And then these clowns came around and started lighting their penis on fire on stage. Why are people laughing at that? Well, it’s shocking in the same way some meathead finds it shocking to say a slur. This new group of people are definitely not politically right-wing or edgelords, but they’re still trying to take risks.”
I have been to The Idiot’s Hour at Baker Falls in the East Village and have seen a bit of non-racist transgression myself. One act had an audience member chew a grape and spit it in their mouth like a mother bird feeding a hatchling. Rabelasian transgression primarily works in a live context, which is why a video will not have the same charge.
Ivy Wolk, who just turned 21 this year and is the only figure widely celebrated by the Dimes Square set that has achieved a larger cult following outside of that ecosystem, tells jokes about her “trash pussy” and talks in a blaccent for comedic effect at times. It is not cheap laughs with her though. LIke another beloved New York artist, director Caveh Zahedi, Wolk is willing to blow up her life, which is what truly confessional art is. Critics like Jesse David Fox say the purpose of confessional comedy is to speak your truth so that an audience member with a similar story to yours can identify. That’s empathy not confession. Confession is admitting something that can incriminate you, that can ruin your social standing. Wolk is notorious not only for her stand-up act, but for her inability to stop any thought of hers from being expressed on social media. There are several fan accounts that are dedicated to archiving all her posts in case they get deleted or worse removed.
Sorry I forgot, there is one more canary in the mine: YouTube is not promoting right-wing YouTubers as much. One reason why, according to Ryan Broderick in the linked piece: YouTube wants to maintain its current reputation as a farm team for young Hollywood directors and Hollywood still does not lean that right. YouTube has more eyeballs than Netflix, but they want Netflix’s relative legitimacy.
The edgelords may have hated the woke patrol, but they are more similar than either side would admit. Both of them are centered around a shallow political aesthetic. They both seem to have an agenda that is centered on telling you how to think: wokies tell you what to feel, edgelords tell you what not to feel. It is worth considering why Anthony Jeselnik hasn’t been canceled. Yes, he may give interviews where he seems to suck up to smug podcast hosts, saying it shouldn’t be easy to make offensive jokes and if you lose the audience, that’s on you. And yet he still makes his offensive jokes onstage. So he makes fun of bulimics and crack babies, acknowledges offstage the feelings of those he offends, then goes back onstage to joke about cancer and baby coffins.
If Gaza divided New York, the Knicks winning their first championship since 1973 (the last year of the Long Sixties) has united it. There have been numerous articles and Instagram infographics about the excitement being an example of Emile Durkheim’s collective effervescence. What is particularly fascinating about this that I haven’t seen bandied about as much: the enthusiasm for Mamdani that seems to accompany it. There is a new meme format that depicts New York as a utopia in comically exaggerated ways (flying dolphins, flying cars). Before they won, there was a viral clip of a fan screaming “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish, my Christian Dior, Knicks in four!” The video was for the prediction market platform Kalshi, which may sour the mood, but I find it interesting that a tech platform is showing a video of someone proud of a Democratic Socialist mayor. A comedian on Instagram compared Mamdani’s ticker-tape parade speech to Martin Luther King. DemSocs have made big strides in the recent New York primary elections. This is all to say that, yet again, the alt-left has been gaining power in the same upward trajectory the New Left did in the Sixties, arguably more so.
Liz Lenkinski wants to prolong this effervescence and calls for a bit of hyperstition where we manifest a summer of love. Might sound woo woo but in 2016 the alt-right used meme magic, with Pepe Frogs as their talismans, to manifest Trump as President. A summer of love would also be a revolution above and beyond politics. But it would be a revolution because the powers-that-be would rather us be angry and alone on our phones than experiencing collective ecstasy together because collective ecstasy can always turn to collective rage, but frustrated lonely anger is the arable soil of authoritarianism. Tech companies make more profit off edgelord content, especially of the AI sort, than they do off crowds frolicking in the park. But that’s another bubble for another time.
Another aspect of post-alternative comedy (a term that gets thrown around the Internet but hasn't been meticulously defined until now, by me) is that unlike the ‘90s and ‘00s, when alternative comedy railed against comedy clubs (preferring alternative venues like bookstores and coffee shops) and eventually radio, the limiting institution of post-alternative comedy is the social media algorithm. Unlike the alternative days though it is near impossible to avoid social media in show biz, so the next best thing is to sneak in your weird ideas, like a network comedian in the ‘60s trying to work past the censors.
big if true
Hell yeah all around! I always love the way you weave things (especially the connections between comedy's arc and our political/psychological moment).