COMEDY AIN'T PRETTY

8 Comics Joining Adam Carolla In The Homophobic Stand-Up Hall of Fame

Adam Carolla is in the hot seat for attacking gays and trans people in a recent podcast. But he’s hardly the first to use the LGBT community as comedic fodder. The wherefores and whys vary from comic to comic: Some claim they’re laughing with us, not at us. (Let us be the judge of that.)  Others are just pandering to immature audiences of college kids or Tea Party delegates. And some are just straight-up dickheads. We’ve compiled a list of eight comics who, like Carolla, have singled themselves out for their homophobic vitriol. It’s by no means a complete list—sadly we don’t have enough bandwidth for that—but you might be surprised by some of the (alleged) funny folks who made the cut. Click ahead to find out! Did we forget someone—or include someone who should’nt be on the list? Let us know in the comments.  
Tracy Morgan Ah good old, Tracy Jordan er Morgan. Given his TV character and Morgan’s own track record for, shall we say, erratic behavior, his anti-gay tirade earlier this year wasn’t a huge shocker. (Morgan’s 2009 Carnegie Hall show was also marred by a string of homophobic comments.) Making jokes at a minority’s expense is one thing, but saying your son, “better talk to me like a man and not in a gay voice or I’ll pull out a knife and stab that little nigger to death”? That’s worse than abusive—it’s just not funny. It’s worth noting that in that routine, Morgan added, “I don’t fucking care if I piss off some gays, because if they can take a fucking dick up their ass … they can take a fucking joke.” Now that’s a little bit funny.  
Victoria Jackson A former SNL cast member known for doing cartwheels and regurgitating dumb-blond shtick, Jackson hasn’t been in the public eye in years. Then the women who co-starred in the carnal romp Casual Sex? came out guns blazing attacking (among other targets) Glee for a”sickening” gay kiss between Curt and Blaine. On her blog for that bastion of hard-hitting news, WorldNetDaily.com, Jackson wrote:
This new al-Qaida magazine for women has beauty tips and suicide-bomber tips! Gimme a break! That is as ridiculous as two men kissing on the mouth! And I don’t care what is politically correct. Everyone knows that two men on a wedding cake is a comedy skit, not an “alternate lifestyle”! There I said it! Ridiculous! Did you see “Glee” this week? Sickening! And, besides shoving the gay thing down our throats, they made a mockery of Christians – again! I wonder what their agenda is? Hey, producers of “Glee” – what’s your agenda? One-way tolerance?
Here’s Jackson clarifying her statements on Showbiz Tonight. (Oh and cudos to them for giving her a free platform.) It’s pretty clear Jackson’s dug her own grave, so we’ll let her off with a “Nice hair!”  

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Jo Koy Earlier this summer, Koy, a regular on the Chelsea Lately roundtable, was  performing at TBS’ Just for Laughs comedy festival in Chicago and apparently went from zero to gay-basher in 3.5. From the Windy City Times:
At one point in his stand-act he danced in a feminine fashion and said, “I made this dance extra gay since I am not gay.” Later his zipper was open to the screams of several female fans in the front row pointing at his jeans. One male voice yelled, “I saw it.” Koy replied, “What are you looking at, fucking faggot?”
In another instance, according to Videogum, Koy told a college crowd, “if he ever caught his son in bed with another boy, he would stab them both to death.” Okay now this guy is just plain stupid. You don’t ride the Chelsea Handler gravy train and then go insulting the gays. Especially not when you set off the gaydar yourself, Baldie.  
Jay Leno While we mostly think of the Tonight Show host as a giggling unfunny tool, he’s  been brought to task for making tasteless gay jokes in his celebrity interviews and monologues. When Ryan Phillipe was on in 2008, Leno asked him to give his “gayest look.”
“Say that camera was your gay lover. Can you give me your gayest look? Say that camera is Billy Bob, Billy Bob has just ridden in shirtless from Wyoming.”
(To his credit, Phillipe was clearly not amused and threatened to walk off the set.) When Amy Poehler commented that her 4-year-old son blew kisses to the New England Patriots on the TV screen, Leno asked if her husband, actor Will Arnett, was worried the boy might be gay. This time, Poehler just laughed it off. There’ve been tacky Richard Simmons jokes, Brokeback Mountain jokes and RuPaul jokes, too. But perhaps most egregiously, Leno is responsible for unleashing Ross the Intern on an unsuspecting world. Good God, man, have you no shame?!?
Jimmy Kimmel Carolla’s former Man Show co-star is a hard one to nail down: He’ll make a video about sexing Ben Affleck, but then toss out snide comments about gay scenes in video games. A few years back Rebecca Romjin was on his show promoting Ugly Betty, on which she played Daniel Mead’s transgender sister. As a “bit,” Kimmel produced photos of Rene Richards, Amanda Lepore and other trans personalities and wondered how the producers made the leap from those people to someone as feminine as Romijn. Later, when Romijn read from a personalized romance novel she gave husband Jerry O’Connell, Kimmel replied, “and then [Jerry] finds out you have a penis and hits you with an ax.” Oh, hate crimes are always a knee slapper! AfterElton did a thorough vetting of Kimmel’s gay content and we still can’t decide whether he’s a friend or foe. Among their findings: Kimmel did a very friendly interview with out N’Sync star Lance Bass but meanly pestered 17-year-old American Idol contestant Sanjaya Malakar about whether he was gay or not. Kimmel even had ex-gay “therapist” Richard Cohen on without tearing the discredited quack a new one. (Leave social issues to John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Jimmy). Most recently, Kimmel took an acceptably mild potshot at the whole Bert and Ernie marriage story: Offensive? Meh. Kimmel’s fence-straddling is indicative of younger comedians who try to play it both ways—coming off as down-with-the-gays one moment, and then making nudge-nudge-look-at-these-freaks jokes the next. We’ve got our eye on you, fat boy.
Eddie Murphy He’s better known for playing an ass (heh) and donning fat suits, but back in the 1980s Murphy was the king of stand-up, with two top rated concert movies, Delirious and Raw, both of which had some pretty hardcore gay content in them.
“I’ve got some rules while I’m doing stand-up. Faggots aren’t allowed to look at my ass while I’m on stage. That’s why i keep moving while I’m up here, because you don’t know where the faggot section is.”
Another gem:
And now they got AIDS, that just kills motherfuckers. Kills people! It petrifies me ’cause girls be hanging out with [gays]. One night they could be in the club having fun with their gay friend, give them a little kiss. And go home with AIDS on their lips!
Some may say Murphy gets a pass, because it was a different time or that he was trying to address the fear and ignorance of the day. He even made a crude plea for acceptance in Delirious:
I fuck with everybody. I don’t mean anything by it. You can hang out with a gay person. Them guys don’t feel, you know, alienated… You can play tennis with a gay person. Really! Just after the game you say, ‘I’m gonna get a beer, what’s you gonna do?’ ‘I think I’m gonna suck some guy’s dick.’ ‘Well, I’ll see you later!'”
Murphy hasn’t been on the stand-up circuit in some years, and given his run-ins with tranny prostitutes and those pesky gay rumors, we doubt he’d resort to gay material if he did return to the stage.
Gallagher The old guy who smashes watermelons on stage? Yup—after decades eliciting laughter by blasting produce to smithereens, the bald, mustachioed comic is now resorting to race-baiting, sexist and anti-LGBT humor to appeal to Tea Party audiences. (Wonder if his brother is ripping those off too?) A Seattle Stranger review of his show reports:
You have your hat backward,” Gallagher sneers at a twentysomething man in the front row. “Are you a homosexual? Because it seems you have a problem figuring out the front from the back.” Big laugh. “I see people every day I can’t figger out what sex they are,” he continues.”
Wow, he’s a regular Bill Hicks.
Above all, everything is gay, gay, gay to Gallagher. He leans into it with the borderline- nonsensical, icked-out, ignorant glee of a boy—or the protest-too-much vigor of a GOP senator. Gallagher delivers your Bible verse for the day: “Without God, we are nothing but dust. What is butt dust? Is that what you get if your homosexual isn’t properly lubricated?” He relates a story about spilling mouthwash onto his crotch during a show: “Lucky for me, there was no homosexuals in the area—’cause my balls was minty fresh.”
In context those jabs could be forgiven. But his coup de grace is a little too creepy, even to connoisseurs of bad taste like us:
Then Gallagher gets a tin pie plate. He opens a giant can of fruit cocktail and pours it in. He opens a can of some Asian vegetable—water chestnuts, maybe—and pours that in, too. “This is the China people and queers!” he screams and takes his sledgehammer to the thing with a fury that is no fun at all.
What a waste of perfectly good fruit.
Andrew Dice Clay For about a hot minute when Mommy and Daddy were teenagers, Andrew Dice Clay was the hottest thing in America. His main claim to fame were x-rated nursery rhymes that were so raunchy they got him banned from MTV… for life. (How do we get Snooki on that track?) But Clay, who’s popped up more recently on Entourage, loved to make fun of the homos. Along with misogyny and racism, it helped fuel his tough-guy Brooklyn image. Nevermind that Dice, like Eddie Murphy, would wear tight leather suits that wouldn’t look out of place in a Peter Berlin movie. Anyway, here’s one of Clay’s infamous homo rants.
That’s why I don’t understand this whole faggot thing. To me it’s just common sense. I don’t see how a guy lays on the beach, looks at another guy’s hairy ass and says, “Oh yeah, I gotta have that!” I ain’t leaving the beach till I see him!” “And they’re too sensitive—they don’t know whether they wanna becalled gays, homosexuals, fairies—I call ’em cocksuckers. I think it spells it out.”
Clay’s cleaned up his act in his dotage, but unrepentant about the old days:
“The jokes I told years ago were not hateful jokes. They were comedic jokes. It was really the gay activist groups that made more of a deal out of it than it was, because if they attacked me, they would get attention.”
Wow, didn’t think the Diceman would resort to playing the victim card. Times have changed indeed.  

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39 Comments*

  • Jamie Noir

    “Good God, man, have you no shame?!?”

    Is that a question we really need to ask of Jay Leno? I’m pretty sure we all know the answer already.

  • Dillon Font

    Re: Jimmy Kimmel

    While it may have all been on Sarah Silverman’s end, or just an excuse for both of them to not get married when they were dating, Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Kimmel both refused to get married until gay people also had the right to get married. That’s a point for Jimmy Kimmel on the pro-homo scoreboard, I’d say.

  • hephaestion

    Lisa Lampanelli: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDd-BgDzfiE

    And if you think her jokes teach straights to like us, check out the comments under this clip.

  • Mike in Asheville

    I am not a Leno fan, I find that he is sometimes assuming.

    I was invited, however, to the Tonight Show for his interview of and performance by Elton John, it was John’s first public appearance following the funeral of Princess Dianna. My hubby and I, and our close yet straight friends who invited us, and the audience as a whole, was quite moved by the sensitivity shown by Leno and getting John to talk about his feelings, which included some very clearly pro-gay sympathy about loss and love.

    I always chalk one up for Leno for that.

  • Cam

    Can you even include Victoria Jackson as a comedienne?

  • Justin

    @Cam: My thoughts exactly. That woman never was funny and never will be. What possessed SNL to hire someone that stupid and unfunny is beyond me. She’s been cordially invited to fuck off and die in a fire.

  • christopher di spirito

    My fantasy is for all of these rabid homophobes to be placed on a boat the Navy uses for target practice.

  • Pete n SFO

    I guess it’s good news that so many of these people are has-beens, and that others wouldn’t go there today. Eddie Murphy? Seriously, can anyone imagine that was really ever funny?

    I’ve been to a Lisa Lampinelli show; she is an equal-opportunity offender and makes it very clear that if people aren’t “down-with-the-gays” to “get-the-fuck-outta-my-show”.

    Leno, is the most pernicious because it’s pandering to the most ignorant and uninformed fear across all of America in single second. No longer, ever, watch the guy.

  • phallus

    You have to wonder if some of this is scripted for the commedian. Whether they refuse to tell the joke(s) or comments is a different story. Actually who gives a crap what Murphy, Clay, Jackson and the rest of these idiots say anyway. With some of their sordid pasts does anyone really take them seriously?

  • Politically Incorrect Thug

    Seems we’re on a path to a society where comedic comments of any sort will be outlawed and punishable by death from the Liberal Police. I understand not appreciating a joke based on sexuality, race, etc, but if you’re so hyper-sensitive to something that might bruise your very thin skin, I suggest your turn the channel or, as gays love to tell straights, “Get over it.”

  • Ian

    Well… Victoria Jackson wasn’t great on SNL… now she’s a bible-thumper spewing hate. Great. Just what we need more of…

  • Bron

    Politically Incorrect Thug : As much as I can’t stand these people listed,you’ve got a point there. We can’t become junior Stalins over this.

  • Henry

    @Bron: That’s right, shithead, you’d much rather have us become junior Hitlers.

  • Bron

    Henry / o : Nor junior Pol Pots.

  • Franklyn

    Maybe its me, but after going through all these lists. I don’t find any of them funny.

  • Queer Supremacist

    @Politically Incorrect Thug: Or we fight fire with fire. What kind of “thug” are you? Get over it? That’s schoolmarm talk! Do something thuggish for once.

  • dellisonly

    @hephaestion: Squeeze in tight pumpkin. Do what you want but she is fighting with us. If you can’t handle a little name calling from one of our supporters, cut yourself and let it scab. You need thicker skin puddin’.

  • Bron

    Queer Supremacist : I agree with that too.

  • Aaron

    I was watching Chelsea Lately once and saw something that basically made me stop watching it forever. During the round table, Handler, these two twin guys (one in glasses), and that Heather woman, got into a conversation over Anna Paquin coming out as bisexual. The two guys basically made comments along the lines of “she’s just a greedy slut who needs to make up her mind” (though more PC than that), and Heather decided to make the coup de grace comment; (and I quote) “Well, you know, I know girls can be Bi, but guys can’t be bisexual. If you’re a guy and have sex with another guy, you’re gay!” The whole round table seemed to agree with her. So much for a show promoting LGBT rights, huh? (Then again, Handler dates 50 Cent, so hypocrisy is to be expected.)

  • Bron

    Actually, any comedian, gay or straight, could totally go to town on Eddie Murphy’s trannie-chasing.

  • Michael

    Andrew Dice Clay is forgiven. That’s a character he created to say horrible things to shock people. He’s no more real that Larry the Cable Guy. Besides, his was the least egregious. A lot of his comedy has to be viewed as watching an absurd character. It would be like black people being mad at Carol O’Conner for the things Archie Bunker said.

  • Bron

    On a related note, now gay comedian Andy Dick is taking heat for his anti-semitic rant directed at Howard Stern. To Stern’s credit, he’s fired back but never mentioned Dick’s sexuality.

  • Mr. Enemabag Jones

    You forgot to include the now deceased Sam Kinison, who said some fag went to Africa and sucked a monkey’s dick, and brought AIDS back to America.

  • Kev C

    @Michael: I wouldn’t call it an act. More of a character based on himself that he kept and became IRL. Being “outrageous” is just a lame excuse for being an attention-seeking foulmouth dirtbag. It’s like saying Eminem is just acting and doesn’t mean anything he says. Yeah sure babe.

  • bab

    Jay Leno isn’t a comedian, he’s a (hardly) living sleeping pill.

  • Jon

    supid cunt….

  • Jon

    stupid cunt..

  • C.J

    I’m so going to gay hell for this, but I laughed pretty hard at “butt dust”. And the one about hairy asses at the beach.
    Actually, I’ll openly admit that I can’t take too much offense to a homophobic joke that actually makes me laugh. It’s when it degrades into petty hate, like Tracy Morgan’s “comedy”, that I start to take it seriously.

  • charles almon (@charles116)

    These poor folks just want to ‘belong’.
    Like the popular kids.
    But their ‘thinking’ is 3o years old.

  • charles almon (@charles116)

    @C.J: Hairy ass on George Clooney – MMMMmmmmmmmmmm.
    Hairy ass on Vince Vaughn – all yours

  • art

    It’s art; it is supposed to make you think.

  • Jayme

    I am and will always be a fan of the Diceman. My dad loved him and his comedy bit. He would even tell some of the nursury rhymes to get my mom and I laughing. Diceman while crude, was a very funny guy.

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  • Pat Duffy

    I never found Corolla funny, mainly because of what he did think was. Reminded me too much of the guys who routinely beatme in highschool….

  • Satire

    I’m convinced that Jay Leno could put his hand on a Bible and swear to God Almighty that he isn’t a homophobe. He truly believes he is not. But his gay jokes are always just a little too edgy to make me feel warm and fuzzy. His style of humor is pretty much teenage boy giggle at most anything. So I chalk it up to his writing staff and him not realizing that some things said are borderline insensitive. He has gotten better but he has a long way to go.

  • J

    To the asshole above who wrote about Lisa Lampanelli —

    Do you know how much she does for the LGBT community? Do you know how much she’s done for AIDS activism? When did the fucking gay pride movement start adopting techniques to ‘please straight people’?

    Long live Lisa. She donates money, time, energy and love to the gay community.
    If you can take a dick – you can take her jokes.

  • That Guy

    It would have been nice to see Gallagher die from that goddamn heart attack he had.

  • WES

    YAH GALAGHERS A TWAT

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