If you’ve ever asked yourself, “Am I the only one who doesn’t find such-and-such comedian funny?” you might be in good company. For every successful comic that comes along, there’s at least one other person in the business who isn’t impressed with their work. Whether or not they feel the need to address that publicly is another matter entirely. Here are a few comedians who had no qualms about naming names when it came to the people they weren’t a fan of.
8. DAVID CROSS
In April 2005, David Cross had the following to say to Rolling Stone when asked about fellow comedian Larry the Cable Guy: “He’s good at what he does. It’s a lot of anti-gay, racist humor—which people like in America—all couched in ‘I’m telling it like it is.’ He’s in the right place at the right time for that gee shucks, proud to be a redneck, ‘I’m just a straight shooter multimillionaire in cutoff flannel selling ringtones’ act. That’s where we are as a nation now. We’re in a stage of vague American values and anti-intellectual pride.”
7. NORM MACDONALD
During a 2018 interview with Vulture, Norm MacDonald expressed his disdain for comedians who talk about real-life issues, telling the publication, “When I was a kid, if I’d heard Red Skelton talking about the government I would’ve thought, ‘This is f—–g weird.’ To me, it hurts the comedy any time anything real creeps into it. I know people have different thoughts. I keep hearing how great Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks and Mort Sahl are. People have their own taste, but to me, all three of those people are just s–t. They’re not comedians in my mind.”
6. PATTON OSWALT
On the 20th anniversary of Bill Hicks’s death in 2014, Patton Oswalt shared an unused introduction he’d written for a Hicks biography in which he confessed that he never thought Lenny Bruce was funny. “I am very aware of how important he was. But his stuff never made me laugh,” Oswalt wrote. He then went on to say, “There are a startling number of comedians my age (and younger!) who say how funny they thought Lenny Bruce was, how much he cracked them up. And I suspect—f–k it, I know—they’re lying. They’re not lying out of self-aggrandizement or even fear. It’s just—they know how important Lenny was, especially in terms of what they do now, onstage, that they assume he’s also, to them, hilarious.”
5. JOE ROGAN
In an interview from years ago, Joe Rogan had this to say on the subject of Andy Kaufman: “Let me tell you something about Andy Kaufman and this f—–g stupid movie that they put out…which is actually a good movie. But it’s wrong. The guy was not funny, he was an a—–e. Only in Hollywood do you take a guy who’s funny, like Jim Carrey, and make him play a guy who was never f—–g funny. Andy Kaufman was never funny. This is what he used to do: He used to go on stage and he used to do s–t that wasn’t funny with the audience expecting it to be funny.”
4. BILL HICKS
In one bit from the posthumous album Rant in E-Minor: Variations, Bill Hicks shared his thoughts on a couple of other popular stand-up comedians from his day: “I’m totally anonymous in this country, meanwhile they’re draining the Pacific and putting up bench seats for Carrot Top’s next Showtime special. ‘Carrot Top, for people who didn’t get Gallagher.’ ‘You know, that Gallagher, he was too heady,’” Hicks joked. “Only America could have a comic named Gallagher who ends his show by destroying good food with a sledgehammer.”
3. BILL MAHER
Appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience in 2020, Bill Maher revealed that he once compiled a list of comedians that he never found funny, which included Danny Thomas, Red Skelton, and Bill Cosby. When Rogan pressed him on Cosby’s stand-up albums, Maher said, “I may have missed some stuff he did, but everything I ever heard…even when I was a kid and I saw him on TV, I’m like, ‘No…this s–t’s corny.’ I feel very, very ahead of my time. I never liked him.”
2. GEORGE CARLIN
In a 1982 interview with Playboy, George Carlin was asked about a number of different comics, and when Don Rickles’s name came up, he responded by saying, “The first few times I saw Rickles, he amazed me with his brashness and willingness to cross lines. But I don’t like the way he closes his act—by apologizing for what he does. It’s insincere. A performer who kisses the audience’s a– is full of s–t.”
1. JIM CARREY
While being interviewed by Playboy in the early 2000s, Jim Carrey said he didn’t believe in meanness. When the interviewer brought up the fact that comedy is sometimes mean, Carrey replied, “Sometimes I trip into it as a comic, but I have trouble reconciling that, too. Try to find a comic who isn’t angry when he’s 70. Why is George Carlin pissed off? He’s brilliant. But the man is so angry it’s getting unnerving. It’s like he practically doesn’t want to live on this planet anymore. I try to understand why that’s happening, because I don’t want that. I want to be a loving human being. I want to look at the world with joy and gratitude and see the things that are good about life.”
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