Splitsider is reporting that Adult Swim has cancelled Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, the “alt-right” show hosted by professional troll Sam Hyde, following calls from various Adult Swim performers, writers, and directors to axe a show that profligates conspiracy theories and promotes homophobia and misogyny. Y’know, for the lulz.
Adult Swim picked up Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, which was slated in the TV dead zone of Saturday night at 12:15 a.m., in August 2016. But Hyde and his “comedy” group, Million Dollar Extreme (MDE), were already big on 4chan — an incubator of the alt-right, as BuzzFeed‘s Joseph Bernstein notes: “The alt-right, which idealizes offensive speech as a principled transgression against a censorious liberal culture, is a natural fit for MDE’s comedy, which combines nerdy references to anime and video games with the sinister goofiness of Tim and Eric, the anti-PC mean streak of pre-corporate Vice, and the terminal irony of meme culture.”
In mid-November, comedian and actor Brett Gelman severed his ties with the Adult Swim network, citing the channel’s treatment of women in a Twitter post. In an interview with Paste , Gelman said he made his departure official after reading a BuzzFeed article which describes Adult Swim’s CEO, Mike Lazzo responding to criticisms of the network’s lack of female talent in a Reddit post. “What I actually said was-women don’t tend to like conflict, comedy often comes from conflict, so that’s probably why we (or others) have so few female projects,” Lazzo wrote. “Nonetheless this was a dumb answer to a good question as Lucille Ball and Gilda Rather to Amy Poelher and Amy Schumer prove my statement a load of generalized nonsense.”
Just six episodes of World Peace aired during its first season over the summer, which now looks to be its last. But don’t assume we’ve seen the last of Hyde and his noxious brand of “humor” — as Amanda Hess pointed out last week, the far right has a way of seeking out safe spaces.