Tony Hinchcliffe has no regrets about the joke he told about the murder of George Floyd during Netflix’s The Roast of Kevin Hart special, he said, but he is peeved by the way his fellow comedians turned on him.
The comedian—who rose to prominence following 2024’s Netflix Roast of Tom Brady and aligned his personal brand with MAGA when he performed at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally later that year, where he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”—reflected on his performance during Thursday’s episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. Hinchcliffe told his buddy Rogan that, before the Hart roast, he thought, “I’m going to go for it.”
“I did a f---ing George Floyd joke at the Tom Brady roast,” he said, referring to his onstage comments at the time, when he said that Rob Gronkowski looked “like the final boss in George Floyd: The Video Game.” He also joked about Kyle Rittenhouse, the conservative man who shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters and wounded another. “I did a Kyle Rittenhouse joke. I did this and then this one, people are offended or something,” he said about his Floyd reference.
“And yeah, if you just watch that clip on my dismount, it’s a crazy clip. But if you watch the entire flow of the roast set, it’s just one last departing joke, which, that’s my thing, man.”
Chelsea Handler notably roasted Hinchcliffe during the live show, saying he had “the face of a school shooter” and the “personality of someone who gets shot first.” Riffing on his frequent race-based jokes, she also said the comedian used “Crest White Supremacist Strips” on his whitening teeth. Hinchcliffe called Handler a “c---” in response and later denied that she bested him.
The comedian, who branded himself a “man of the people,” per the title of his latest Netflix special (which was promoted by his promising jokes about “Blacks, Latinos, the whites, the Indians, and Asians,” he said on Thursday), was struck most by the responses from other comedians who condemned the joke.
“It’s funny because it was a lot of comedians, a lot of Black comedians, were like, ‘I’m upset about this.’ They made their videos, which is just hilarious, because they’re not on the roast—they’re not in attendance at the roast.” He praised Tiffany Haddish, who he told Rogan was “baited” into slamming his comments about Floyd. Instead of answering whether the joke went too far, Haddish told TMZ she had gone to the bathroom and hadn’t heard it. Her only complaint, she said, was that it was “too damn long.”
Hinchcliffe continued justifying the ill-fated quip, “There were so many people on it. It was such a long, big roast, you know, they set you to an allotted time. So, I’m like, OK, I’m going to do something I don’t normally do and blast off more jokes per minute than I normally do. Instead of milking it and getting applause breaks and things like that.” Ultimately, he said, “I have something that’s supposed to offend everybody. I don’t want you to like 100 percent of any of my jokes.”
“I’m not that guy. I’m heelish. I’m a bad guy wrestling fan. So what’s funny is people got offended about the George Floyd thing, and a lot of people said, ‘Yeah, well Pete Davidson did a Charlie Kirk joke.’ And they’re comparing these things from two different spectrums. But what they didn’t mention is that I did a Charlie Kirk joke in my set,” he added. “Everybody gets it, is always my point. So, f--- them.”
