Tony Hinchcliffe is back to his usual shtick, “making fun” of different ethnic groups, with plenty of help from Netflix.
The Donald Trump fan went mainstream following his appearance on the streamer’s Roast of Tom Brady in 2024, after which he gained fame of a different kind when he told racially insensitive jokes at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally later that year.
Netflix rewarded the appearance with a major deal, offering the comedian four specials last March—three for his show Kill Tony, and one for an hour of his own stand-up.
On Tuesday, the streamer released the teaser for that stand-up special, titled Man of the People, in which the very first words out of the comedian’s mouth emphasize that he’s “made fun of Blacks, Latinos, the whites, the Indians, Asians.” The streamer’s description teases, “Tony tears into every group imaginable in and outside his audience, proving that nobody is safe when a true man of the people grabs the microphone.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Netflix for comment.
Hinchcliffe cemented his persona as an anti-woke comedian following his performance at Trump’s rally, where he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” He told Bill Maher that he performed at the rally in the hopes of “swinging a few thousand votes” to Trump, and having the president say, “‘That was cool. Thanks, man. That was awesome, I liked your set.’”
Trump, instead, downplayed Hinchcliffe’s association with his campaign and told Fox News the comedian “probably shouldn’t have been there.”
Netflix’s announcement of his standup special comes after Hinchcliffe was skewered by Chelsea Handler on The Roast of Kevin Hart last month, when she said he used “Crest White Supremacist Strips” on his teeth and that he was “what happens when women don’t have safe access to abortion care.”
Hinchcliffe struggled to respond, only calling Handler a “frigid, cold b---h” during the show, a “c---” later on, and then claiming he took the “opportunity to remind Chelsea Handler what she looks like and where her life is” during the program.
Hinchcliffe also insisted that Handler did not best him comedically during the roast (and that any reports saying she did only prove “the news isn’t real,” he said), and that he is not racist.
“I guess the guy that pulls names out of a bucket, giving everybody an opportunity, is a Nazi,” he said on his show last week, referencing his Kill Tony show setup, in which aspiring comedians put their names in a bucket for a chance to perform for 60 seconds.
At that Kevin Hart roast, which drew him the accusation once again, Hinchcliffe made a joke about the public murder of Minnesota man George Floyd, when he told Hart that Floyd “is looking up at us all laughing so hard he can’t breathe.” The comment, which has been blasted for being plain unfunny by other comedians, was condemned as racist by others.
Floyd’s family started a petition for Netflix and Hart to pay the proceeds from the event to the Floyd Family Center for Social Equity, a nonprofit established by Floyd’s family after his death. The petition has over 10,000 signatures.
But Netflix isn’t batting an eye. Hinchcliffe’s teaser for his one-hour special praises Hinchcliffe as “brutally unapologetic” and calls him “comedy’s favorite equal-opportunity offender.”
Hinchcliffe says in the one-minute clip, “I’d imagine if I were sitting where you are right now and I bought a ticket to a Tony Hinchcliffe show, I’d be probably thinking to myself, ‘Tony, where are those Jew jokes?’ Well, I’m averaging about four specials a year with Netflix right now, and I’m not in the mood to make Jew jokes anymore.”
While some have attributed Hinchcliffe’s embrace by the platform as a symptom of Trump’s “anti-woke” crusade, analysts have pointed out that Netflix has courted Hinchcliffe’s kind of comedy for years. It drew backlash in October 2021 for platforming Dave Chappelle’s jokes about trans people in his specials, which resulted in an employee walkout in protest. Netflix fired an employee in connection with the walkout and, the following year, changed its human resources guidelines on “Artistic Expression.”
“As employees…we understand that, depending on our roles, we may need to work on TV shows, films, or games we perceive to be harmful,” the guidelines now read. “If you’d find it hard to support the breadth of our slate, Netflix is probably not the best place for you.”
