What if stand-up comedy had its own version of The Gong Show that blew up on YouTube to the point where it felt almost like American Idol? That’s kinda the vibe Tony Hinchcliffe‘s “Kill Tony” has had going for it for years in Los Angeles and Austin, but how will it translate to a worldwide audience of casual Netflix viewers? Can it translate?
The Gist: The premise of Kill Tony is simple enough.
Take your typical open-mic comedy night, where you sign up for a slot, wait and hope for your name to be pulled from the bucket, then get onstage and tell your jokes for a few minutes. But Kill Tony introduces big twists. You only get one minute of stage time. After 60 seconds, the open mic comic has to face a panel of judges, all of whom are not only headliners, but headlining comedians loaded with zingers to roast the newbie.
Tony Hinchcliffe launched Kill Tony in the smaller Belly Room of The Comedy Store in West Hollywood a dozen years ago, and had grown it into the club’s main room fixture on Monday nights before the pandemic, when he followed Joe Rogan in exodus to Austin. Over the years, Hinchcliffe has added surprise guests as well as “regulars” to perform in between the open mic’ers, as well as a full backing band onstage. And his YouTube audience has grown to more than 2 million subscribers, with enough fans to even sell out Madison Square Garden last year; Netflix also added Kill Tony to its Los Angeles festival last May with shows at the Kia Forum as well as the adjoining YouTube Theater, where they were sufficiently impressed by scenes such as the clip Netflix posted to its own YouTube channel to grant Hinchcliffe a three-special deal for Kill Tony, as well as an individual special for himself.
Hinchcliffe also had performed during Netflix’s live Roast of Tom Brady last May, and had his own solo stand-up hour on Netflix a decade ago (which later disappeared from the platform and the rest of the Internet).
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Despite the central premise of platforming new comedians in a make-or-break moment, Kill Tony looks and feels a lot more like Adam Ray’s recent Dr. Phil special on Netflix. And not just because Ray performs as Dr. Phil in both.
Memorable Jokes: Alas, the most memorable moments aren’t jokes, exactly.
The real highlight humor-wise comes near the end from longtime Texan Ron White, who joked about getting dumped and left in a big house in the suburbs with a gay assistant.
Otherwise, Shane Gillis appears as a panelist impersonating President Trump, but slips in and out of character throughout to comment on the proceedings. Kyle Dunnigan and Adam Ray work double duty, respectively pulling off two impersonations within the same show; Dunnigan as Elon Musk and later Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Ray as Joe Biden and later Dr. Phil. “Roastmaster General” Jeffrey Ross also dropped in for a guest set.
Joe Rogan and Tom Segura are the other comedians portraying themselves as guest panel judges alongside Hinchcliffe and his co-host/producer, Brian Redban. But neither Rogan nor Segura add much to the actual proceedings, except to plug Segura’s upcoming Netflix sketch series, Bad Thoughts (Hinchcliffe also plugs the second season of Gillis’s Netflix series, Tires), and to have Gillis, Segura and Rogan all lend an air of legitimacy to all of this foolishness.
Our Take: Because it’s quite a foolish endeavor. Aside from Dunnigan’s character work, nobody else seems to have brought any prepared, polished material. If you only had one or a few minutes of stage time as an open mic comic to try to impress Gillis and Segura, or if you’re a more established comedian getting your first chance to reach Netflix’s audience, would you really waste that opportunity on half-baked premises and lackluster punchlines?
Hinchcliffe claimed more than 300 aspiring stand-ups stood in line to place their names in the bucket for a shot at instant fame. Some of those selected revealed they had come from far and wide for this opportunity. One guy came in from Los Angeles; another from Providence, cracked that he’d have to quit his day job in Rhode Island once this aired; another from Chicago said he was in the area working as a cameraman for a reality TV series; yet another said he had rode his BMX bicycle all the way from San Diego just for this.
And then there was the spectacle Hinchcliffe made out of the fact that he just had to dig into the bucket to find the name of a female comedian, only to then have himself and Redban make an even bigger point of objectifying her whilst also rewarding her with a booked spot on Kill Tony‘s upcoming return to Madison Square Garden this August.
No matter how much Hinchcliffe hyped up his “great regulars,” none of them delivered anything that landed past Hinchcliffe and his fellow panelists.
Even Adam Ray’s jokes in character, much of them he read off of a sheet of paper, amounted to little more than roast jokes at the expense of Kill Tony‘s Austin regulars, which mean next to nothing to anyone tuning into this show for the first time, especially since Ray also roasted Austin comedians who hadn’t even yet appeared onstage. Perhaps Ray’s most efficient zinger? “If we get rid of autism, you won’t have any Kill Tony regulars.”
Gillis also interjected at one point that Netflix would have to edit a bunch out of this episode.
And yet, it’s still two hours and several minutes of one massively long inside joke.
After the final comic, show regular and “Hall of Fame in the Kill Tony Universe” William Montgomery, is greeted by a standing O from the crowd, he proceeds to bomb onstage and then joke about his performance afterward. “I was thinking this was a good opportunity for me, and I really dropped the ball on all of those f—ng jokes,” Montgomery said. Hinchcliffe stops him to remark that anyone not laughing just didn’t get it. “We do this every single week. And every week — this happens.”
Ultimately, this is much like any of the hundreds or thousands of unheralded open mic nights happening across America in any given week. People who want to be performers but have yet to learn how to perform, dropping lots of casual racism, misogyny and homophobia/transphobia chasing what they believe to be the easiest attainable laughs. When you create an atmosphere that’s a mix of The Gong Show and “morning zoo” radio, it only feeds into this hacky myth.
Even Hinchcliffe slips into unnecessarily racist accents and zingers, at one point stopping to try to cover for it by zinging himself, saying: “I’m getting word the show has been canceled.”
But that’s not stopping him. Earlier in the episode, Hinchcliffe alerted everyone who might be questioning their decision to watch Kill Tony by offering: “If you’re ever offended by anything, you will be offended by this show. And you’re two clicks away from John Mulaney. So just go over there, and then you’ll be fine. He’s not going to offend you. This will. This is for people who don’t get offended.”
Obviously there are at least a couple of million fans who love this enough to subscribe to the YouTube channel, pay for enough tickets to fill arenas, and join hundreds of other comedians in line just for a lottery chance at a 60-second audition.
And White, who after all was the guy who convinced Rogan to invest in Austin and open the club that would become the Comedy Mothership, delivered a testimonial about Kill Tony, arguing that it’s an inclusive atmosphere, inviting anyone anywhere to pursue their comedy dreams. “It is an open stage for people who want to try to be funny. And if you get up here from a bucket pull and you suck, you can remind us all just how f—ing hard this is.”
Our Call: SKIP IT. I’m not sure what appeal this has to anyone who’s not already a devoted fan of the show other than watching the comedy equivalent of a slow-motion car crash. It’s not even about being offended. It’s about wanting to watch a comedy show where professional comedians deliver actual comedy. This is literally amateur hour times two. Which, considering Kill Tony had 700 Mondays to prepare for their Netflix moment, you might’ve thought would be ready to shine in this spotlight. And yet.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
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