If you know me, I’m the anti-conspiracy theory guy. I spend a lot of my time putting conspiracy theorists on blast and debunking misinformation. One of the reasons I do this is because I’m a natural skeptic. I don’t trust anyone, so I’m always questioning. As soon as I heard Andrew Schulz’s new standup was censored by a streaming service, I was instantly skeptical. Now, I feel like one of the conspiracy theorists I debunk, but nobody is even discussing how strange this story is, so at the risk of sounding insane, I felt this is worth diving into.
We’re dealing with massive amounts of censorship, and comedians have become public enemy number one. Andrew Schulz says a streaming service censored his new standup, so he funded it himself. I was skeptical at first, but now that the standup is available on YouTube, I’m even more skeptical than before about his story.
Before getting started, I need to get something out of the way for all the Shulz fans who stumble across this and are about to blow up my comments without even seeing what I have to say.
I’m a major Andrew Schulz fan. I think he’s hilarious, and it’s been awesome watching him become one of the most successful comedians in recent years. I remember watching videos of his standups years ago when he wasn’t as well known, and he was bringing something fresh and hilarious.
With all of the insanity of the culture wars, I love comedians who aren’t afraid to go after anyone and everyone. There’s a lot of pandering to the anti-woke, but people like Andrew Schulz, Tim Dillon and some others have no problem making fun of how silly they are. Andrew is thoughtful with his comedy and isn’t like other comedians right now who solely make fun of trans people in the hopes of making headlines for “being canceled.”
His podcast is great, and I think he has some great conversations about what’s going on in the world today while also injecting a ton of humor. So, if you’re here thinking I’m just some “hater”, you’re wrong.
I’m just a skeptical guy who likes to keep people honest, and this whole censorship story sounds really fishy. Even though I love the guy, I don’t see anyone showing the slightest bit of skepticism.
I respect having my opinions challenged. So, if by the end of this, you think Schulz’s story checks out, let me know in the comments. But, I think as we “connect these dots”, you’ll see where I’m coming from.
So, what the hell even happened?
I’m going to give a quick rundown of what happened for those of you who don’t know. If you’re familiar with the story behind Andrew Schulz’s new standup special Infamous and how it was censored, feel free to skip to the next section.
But, for those of you who don’t know, Andrew Schulz is a comedian and podcast host. His podcast Flagrant is one of the biggest podcasts in the world if I’m not mistaken. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, his podcast’s Patreon is #8 for the highest-paid Patreons. With over 20,000 patrons, the Flagrant podcast brings in almost $100,000 every single month. In addition to his Patreon, the episodes are sponsored, so they’re doing pretty well.
I don’t bring this up to say, “People making money are bad.” I actually bring this up because it’s probably one of the best arguments against my theory.
Anywho, since blowing up, Andrew Schulz hasn’t had a major standup special. Myself and many of his other fans have been waiting, and it was finally coming. He’s obviously had his standups filmed, but this was going to be a big production that was released to the masses and those who were unfamiliar with him.
I don’t listen to the podcast regularly, so I’m not sure if it was announced prior to the censorship story, but when he was censored, that’s when I first heard about it.
Apparently, Andrew signed a major contract with a large streaming service. They were going to pay him some big bucks. I’m not sure if the exact number has been said, but it must’ve been in the millions. But after recording the standup, the streaming service executives wanted to censor it by cutting some bits that they found might be too offensive and get pushback from the social justice warriors and all that fun stuff.
Out of principle, Andrew bought himself out of the counteract to get the rights back to the special. The reason I’m assuming he was getting paid millions for this special was because it cost him millions to buy himself out of the contract. After he bought it back, he launched it on his website behind a paywall to hopefully recoup his money.
That’s the jist of the story, and now, we dive into some details.
After the censorship
Whenever a standup comedian has a new special coming out, they do their rounds promoting it on various podcasts. In 99.9% of the cases, the comedians go on the podcasts of various comedians to discuss the standup and some other topics. Comedian podcasts are some of the most popular podcasts, so as someone who works in marketing, this makes sense. When you go on the podcasts of fellow comedians, you’re reaching your target audience. You’re letting people who enjoy comedy know that you have a new special coming out.
Due to being censored, Andrew Schulz’s promotion tour was much different.
He went on a ton of podcasts, and most of them are what you’d expect:
What made Schulz’s promotion tour different was all of the non-comedian podcasts he went on:
These are just some of the podcasts he was on while promoting the standup.
Hopefully, you’ll notice what a lot of the non-comedian podcasts have in common. Most of these are anti-cancel culture, “the world is so sensitive”, “free speech” type podcasts. Former New York Times editor Bari Weiss, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, Dave Portnoy, Adam22 from No Jumper; all of these people are extremely vocal about these things.
The only podcast I listen to from this list regularly is Bari Weiss’, and it’s not that often. I mainly listen if her and the guest are discussing a story I’m unfamiliar with because even with my criticisms of Bari Weiss, you can’t deny that she covers stories that don’t get enough attention. For example, I started really listening regularly after her episode with Kmele Foster about The Real Story of “The Central Park Karen”
On a side note, you really should listen to that episode. I’m kind of blown away that so many people still reference that story to this day, but I don’t think they know all of the details of the story aside from the viral video.
What really got me curious was the way Bari Weiss discussed Andrew’s comedy and standup. Bari seems like she has the humor of an accountant. While she’s all about free speech, she seems like one of the least fun people ever. No offense to Bari, but she seems basic as hell.
I'm less familiar with Megyn Kelly, but she seems similarly borning. So, these two suddenly having a massive interest in comedy when they hear about what happens to Dave Chappelle or Andrew Schulz really gets me curious.
But what I’m getting at was this was also a genius marketing move by Schulz because not only was he tapping into the audience who enjoys comedy, but he was tapping into massive audiences who are against censorship and cancel culture.
Not only was he on all of these podcasts, but the story was spreading like wildfire. I was hearing about his story everywhere on other podcasts and YouTube channels. “Did you hear about Andrew Schultz? He had to buy himself out of his contract because a streaming service was censoring him.”
What the interviews were like
As I saw Andrew blow up this summer making his rounds, that’s when I started getting skeptical. I listened to probably four or five of his interviews, and the story was consistent.
He explained what happened, but then you got to hear about this guy just trying to get his comedy out who was getting censored. On each podcast, he discussed how expensive it was to buy himself out of his contract. He said that he had to pull out just about all of his life savings in order to buy out his contract. So, this was a huge gamble for him.
He talked about how scary it was to spend all of his life savings buying out his contract. But, when he discussed this, he’d really drive home the point of being a man of principle and discuss what comedy is supposed to be.
I don’t disagree with him about any of that. I personally think that as soon as you walk into a comedy special, you have to get rid of all of your sensitivities. I know a ton of my fellow leftists disagree with me on this, but comedy has helped me through extremely dark times. I love comedy because we can sit and laugh at the most painful, messed up things in life, and it sort of weakens them.
If you haven’t watched Neal Brennan’s 3 Mics standup on Netflix, it’s a great example. Brennan is able to talk about his lifelong struggle with crippling depression by making fun of it while also being extremely serious.
But as far as Schulz goes, I’m extremely interested in psychology, human behavior, and influence. Schulz’s story is a masterclass on how to get people to support you.
This is a David vs Goliath story of one guy standing up to a massive streaming service and putting himself at risk due to his principles. He’s telling these podcast audiences that he’s a man who stands up for free speech and won’t get censored. Even if it is a massive risk for him, he’s going to do it anyway because that’s how important it is for him to do his craft.
There’s something called the “identifiable victim” effect, which is researched heavily in psychology. They started noticing it when they were trying to figure out better ways to raise money for charity organizations. They realized that if you tell people there are thousands of starving children, people don’t donate much. But if you tell them a very specific story about one child, people are much more likely to donate.
Schulz’s story made him an identifiable victim. Much like how we mindlessly throw $100,000 at a GoFundMe that’s only requesting $5,000, I knew Andrew was going to make bank off of this standup special.
Why the story doesn’t add up
Alright, time to put on the tin foil hats, ya’ll.
The story just doesn’t add up.
The first thing to note about all of Andrew’s interviews is that he never says what streaming service it is. That makes sense. When he tells the story, he says that he doesn’t want a bunch of people going and attacking the streaming service. He says that someone there who was high up was fighting for him and trying to get them not to censor it, so out of respect to that person, he doesn’t want to put the streaming service on blast.
This leaves it up to us to start guessing. And the question we’re left with is, “What streaming service would censor him?”
Well, what streaming services have been hosting standup specials?
Netflix
HBO
YouTube
Comedy Central/Paramount+
If I’m missing any, please let me know in the comments. I honestly want to know so I can debunk myself. And I also want to know where I can find more standups.
Let’s go through this list, though:
Netflix
It couldn’t have been Netflix. First off, Netflix is the streaming service where all of this comedy censorship started with Dave Chappelle’s specials. And I’ll discuss this soon, but Andrew Schulz’s offensive jokes weren’t even a fraction of what else is on Netflix. For example, Ricky Gervais had a joke about pleasuring himself to baby pictures of Hitler.
HBO
I’m not seeing it being HBO. You could argue that HBO is “woke” because they had Jerrod Charmichael’s standup on there where he came out to the world in his special. But, if you argued that, you’d be pretty dumb. It’s a great standup and doesn’t make the service “woke”. HBO is also the home of Bill Maher’s show, where that boomer tries ridiculously hard to get canceled on a weekly basis for “telling it how it is”. So, I don’t see it being HBO Max.
YouTube
YouTube doesn’t sign contracts with comedians. A lot of comedians just post their standups there because they’re doing a cost-benefit analysis. Although they’ll most likely not be monetized, they’re hoping to reach the largest audience possible by having their free standup shared. That way, they can make money down the line as they gain a larger following.
Comedy Central/Paramount+
This is the only one that would even make some sense to me, but it still doesn’t seem like that would happen with this streaming service. My main argument here is that South Park streams on Paramount+, and South Park gets away with a ton of offensive stuff. The counter to this argument is that South Park will bring in more money than Schulz, so that’s why they’re alright with the risk of whatever jokes South Park will make.
Again, if I’m missing any streaming services, let me know. But, if I’m missing any, I’d also argue that it’s probably not one of those because they aren’t that big. Unless it was a streaming service looking to break into the standup comedy special game, I don’t see that being the case, either. Plus, have you heard of any streaming services trying to do this recently? I sure as hell haven’t.
The other reason Schulz’s story doesn’t make sense is because Netflix has a proven model of success, and it’s made them stupid amounts of money. I don’t know if you got the memo, but in a society rooted in capitalism, morals don’t matter; money does.
Netflix stuck to their guns and continued to platform Dave Chappelle. When their staff walked out and protested, and everyone screamed to cancel the service, nothing happened. Netflix continues to host comedians without censorship, and comedy lovers as well as the anti-woke sheep absolutely love it.
And yeah, I’m going to take a second to call out the anti-woke who all of a sudden like comedy that isn’t the Blue Collar Comedy tour. I see you. These people only watch these comedy specials and pretend to laugh as a virtue signal to their tribe that they’re anti-woke. You want me to believe that Ben Shapiro actually enjoys standup specials? I believe that about as much as I believe he’ll start supporting universal healthcare.
The point is, Netflix has made massive profits by not censoring comedians. So, why would any of their competition look at that and then do the opposite? That’s hard to imagine.
Before any of you come in here saying, “But Netflix has been having financial problems and their stock’s share price has fallen!” I know this, but that has 0 relation to Dave Chappelle. That’s due to other factors like the fact that everyone and their mom has a streaming service now, and Netflix is one of the only ones without an ad model, which is probably changing soon.
Alright, so Schulz says this nameless streaming service was trying to censor him. The next question we have to ask is, “Why?”
When I was trying to figure out why, the same jokes kept coming up in his interviews. He said that he made a Ted Bundy joke and an abortion joke. This is when I went full-blown conspiracy mode.
You mean to tell me someone was going to censor him over a Ted Bundy or abortion joke? First off, the only people who’d be offended by the Ted Bundy joke is the new community of people debating the ethics of true crime, and this isn’t a large community. And the abortion joke? Liberals, the ones who are supposedly canceling all the comedians make abortion jokes all the time because it pisses off the right.
If you don’t believe me, go check out Libs of TikTok’s twitter feed. Every other day, she’s posting a TikTok of a liberal joking about abortions, and she loses her mind.
As mentioned, now that the special isn’t behind a paywall, I watched it. I love supporting comedians and creators, but I was waiting to watch this one for free because A) I was skeptical about the story and B) Schulz makes a ton of money. I’ve paid for some smaller comedians, but I wasn’t going to pay for this one.
I watched the standup to get the full, uncensored context of these insanely offensive jokes, and that’s why I’m sitting down discussing this.
Andrew Schulz is hilarious, and I’d probably put this standup in the top 10 or maybe top 5 standups of 2022. But as far ass offensive jokes go…I told you about Ricky Gervais having a joke about pleasuring himself to baby pictures of Hitler, right?
I don’t think Andrew Schulz even had one trans joke throughout the entire standup. I actually think that’s great because the trans jokes are getting so damn boring and old. I’m not one of those woke warriors about it either. I’ve just noticed how comedians seem to shove trans jokes in their specials just to get the anti-woke people supporting it while the woke give them free publicity. The jokes are just stale and boring.
Aside from Schulz’s Bundy and abortion joke, the next most offensive joke he has is about Michael Jackson. And if I’m being honest, while it was funny, it wasn’t original. If you watched Dave Chappelle’s For What It’s Worth standup from 2004, it’s pretty much the same. Basically, Michael Jackson is such a star, that any kid touched by Michael should be happy about it.
And before you freak out, I’m not saying Schulz copied the joke. I’m just saying it wasn’t something so original that it was a new level of offensiveness the world has never seen. He parlays this into a joke about Michael Jordan tossing his salad, and that’s about it.
So, with all of this, all I’m saying is that his story doesn’t make sense.
Is it possible? Of course. I don’t know the whole story, and unless he ever calls out the streaming service, we’ll never know.
I’m just saying that as a skeptic, this sounds way too strange. I can’t think of a single platform that would censor him when they’d make massive amounts of money off it if it was that offensive. And I didn’t hear any jokes that were anywhere near as offensive as many other specials.
I’m still a massive Schulz fan, but I just think it’s possible that this story is bogus and was made up as a way to make money and get free PR by going on podcasts that’d reach new audiences.
And now that you’ve heard my arguments, let me know in the comments if you think I’m out of my mind and should go join QAnon.
If you enjoyed this post, it’d mean a lot to me if you shared it. Forward it in an email, share it on social media, or whatever suits your fancy.
To stay updated follow me on Twitter and Instagram @TheRewiredSoul and subscribe to the Substack.
I recently noticed Peacock is another streaming service with original standup content. Not thinking that makes your skepticism about his story any less founded, however. Particularly because I watched a comedian tell some rather in your face (hilarious) jokes about abortion in her special on Peacock.