The longtime musical duo of Jack Black and Kyle Gass hit a roadblock in 2024 after Gass made an ill-advised joke about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump during a campaign rally that summer. His comment, made during a live show, immediately created a rift between him and Black. This led Tenacious D to cancel the rest of their tour that year.
Gass issued an apology on social media at the time, calling the comment “highly inappropriate, dangerous, and a terrible mistake.” He subsequently removed the post, but Jack Black went into damage control mode. They canceled all future Tenacious D plans, with Black stating he was “blindsided by what was said at the show.”
Both Gass and Black promised that wasn’t the end of the band, however. Instead, they seemed to take time to reflect and reevaluate. Gass’ falling out with Black was a devastating blow for fans. But in a January 2026 interview with Rolling Stone, Gass shared his thoughts about the scandal and the rift in his friendship with Black.
Crucially for fans, Gass revealed that Tenacious D will definitely return. “We’re gonna come back – it’s gonna be bigger than Oasis. We will be back! We will return,” he said. When that will actually happen, he didn’t say. But he went into detail about how he and Jack Black healed their rift.
“I’m human, I made a mistake. I was going for a joke,” he said of the incident. “But timing is everything. If there was ever a ‘too soon,’ it was this.”
True, there’s the old adage that tragedy plus time equals comedy. Gass’ joke during the concert came on the same day as the attack. Clearly, there wasn’t the benefit of time to buffer the edge of his dark joke for some people.
Kyle Gass Teases Return of Tenacious D, Comments On Rift in Friendship With Jack Black
Gass then continued, “It was terrible. It was terrible judgment, obviously. I’ve felt terrible ever since, because it’s such a responsibility to not screw up like that.”
According to Gass, he said the band received threats after he made his comments. He and Black weren’t sure what to do after that, and began discussing options for the future of Tenacious D.
“We were discussing what we were going to do [with the band],” Gass said. “I think we were considering taking a show off and getting back out there. I thought I could apologise onstage, like, ‘Hey, I wasn’t thinking straight.’ But at that point, there were safety concerns.”
The aforementioned threats made the decision for them. “And once you get into that,” he added, “it just doesn’t matter.”
After Gass posted his public apology, hoping to make the situation right, he said it actually made things worse. He called it a “tsunami of s***,” specifically. On top of canceling the Tenacious D tour and future projects, his agent also dropped him unexpectedly.
“I think he wanted to get in the news cycle too,” Gass said of his agent’s decision. “It did feel like an overreaction. But that speaks more to my relationship with my agent. I’ve been around a long time, and I guess he was tired of me saying no to too many projects or something. He saw an opening.”
Kyle Gass Apologized For His Badly-Timed Dark Joke, But the News Cycle Spun Its Web
Kyle Gass shared that once the news cycle got hold of his public apology, it was constantly spun into its own narrative. He eventually took the post down because it was already printed everywhere and looked disingenuous. Or, as he described, “It looks like a dead fish just laying there.”
He added that he waffled back and forth on taking the post down and putting it back up. Eventually, he left it down, but not before some serious contemplation. “I think that was definitely a misunderstanding,” he said. “If I would have recanted, I would’ve said, ‘I’m taking this down because now on further reflection…’”
Gass continued, “But no. It’s out there. And then, it’s like, should I put it back up? It just felt so wrong at that point. To have that be a separate news story was really disappointing.”
Unfortunately, the situation drove a wedge between Tenacious D. For a while, they didn’t speak to each other directly. But Gass said that, ultimately, he understood why it happened. He even went so far as to say he “might have deserved it.”
“[Black] was doing what he felt he had to do,” said Gass. “We’re separate people, always, and we’re on different career paths. I totally understood what he needed to protect. I didn’t begrudge him any of that. He had to protect himself from his loose cannon partner over here. I totally understood once safety concerns got in.”
Now that it seems things are going well for Tenacious D once again, fans have something to look forward to.
Photo by Jeff Hahne/Getty Images
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