Carolla vs. Kindler: When Jealous Losers Attack

It’s supposedly one of the highlights of the annual Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal:

Some comedian named Andy Kindler (?) delivers the “State of the Industry” address, which, from what I can gather, is a sort of “roast” of other comics.

Except the “roaster” — that is, Kindler — clearly isn’t “just kidding.”

(My philosophy? “No one is ever just kidding.” No, not even comedians. Especially not comedians. It’s a motto that’s served me well…)

Maybe you had to be there, and I wasn’t, but Andy Kindler comes across as a bitter, nasty piece of work.

And who can blame him?

After all, his biggest claim to fame is that every year, he delivers an unfunny speech in which he insults other, funnier, more successful comedians.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say this arrangement is actually an elaborate, ironic, high-concept prank on Kindler himself, a la Windy City Heat.

This year, everyone in the business is talking about Kindler’s attack on author/podcaster Adam Carolla.

Kindler’s attack on Carolla is much longer and more vicious than early reports indicated.

Some excerpts:

I’d like to apologize to everybody here, and everybody in America for going on Adam Carolla’s terrible, terrible podcast. I really had no idea. I just thought he was The Man Show, and he was — I didn’t know he was a terrible human being. I thought he was slightly amusing and kidding around. I had no idea that he’s a bigot with a capital NAZI. (…)

By the way, you know a white person is leaning toward racism if they start all of a sudden complaining about how much taxes they pay under Obama. (…)

By the way, anybody who goes on Celebrity Apprentice. You’ve got to either not know what’s going on, or you’ve got to be a racist. I’m just telling you. You’re all racists if you go on. He is raising money on Donald Trump’s Kickstarter thing. And it’s not money for him to have a comedy workshop, or for therapy to find out why he’s a jerk. He’s raising money for a movie called Road Hard. (…)

Like he would know about the road. He’s not a stand-up comic!

If you’re not a comedian, if you’re literally not saying anything funny, you’re just a bigot or a racist. (…)

What Adam Carolla‘s doing, neo-Nazis should have thought about years ago. They should have beat black people’s heads in…in a comedy club. (…)

Adam Carolla is like Hitler, if Hitler wasn’t funny. Donald Trump’s website is called FundAnything. He means, maybe you want to start the KKK in your hometown but you can’t afford the sheets.

So Andy Kindler has clearly never heard of Godwin’s Law.

Carolla’s Nazi Party membership will come as a helluva shock to Dennis Prager.

(And wait until Lisa Lampanelli hears she’s a “racist,” too…)

OK, let’s put aside Kindler’s tired, unimaginative, and gratuitous liberal insults. They come as no surprise.

What gets me is that, for a guy who gives the “State of the Industry” address each year, Andy Kindler doesn’t seem to understand how his own industry works.

Yes, Carolla is “literally a millionaire,” as he likes to joke.

And yes, Carolla is crowdfunding his new movie, Road Hard.

Tom Cruise is also a millionaire, many times over.

Kindler (as an “industry” expert) surely knows that Cruise doesn’t singlehandedly cough up the whole zillion dollar budget for his new movies.

As I write this, Carolla has raised over $900,000 to make Road Hard, giving lots of ordinary folks the chance to be mini movie producers, get cool swag and go to private parties with Carolla and the cast.

And since the movie is about a stand-up working the club circuit, Carolla is encouraging budding comics to audition for small parts in his film, by uploading their performance reels to YouTube.

Look: Lots of people get a kick out of being Broadway show “angels”; it’s the whole premise of The Producers — a movie I’d stupidly presumed most comedians would be kinda familiar with.

Carolla is just giving his fans a chance to be movie “angels.”

It’s like buying a ticket for a film before it comes out, instead of after.

In short:

Who else but a bitchy B-list creep gives a crap?

Some of you are probably wondering right now:

“Hey, since when do stand-up comedians, of all people, use words like ‘racist’, or ‘homophobic’, or get all choked up over rape jokes or tranny jokes?”

Ah, see: You haven’t been paying attention.

For about 10 years or so, as colleges have been spitting out more brainwashed beta male fruitcakes and their perpetually pre-menstrual female enablers, something called “alternative” comedy has been spreading like a rash.

It’s politically correct, it’s all about “community” and — here’s the “alternative” part — it’s not really funny. Get it?

No? Oh, poor you.

You didn’t take enough long form improv classes or go to the right college or vote for the right president.

Can I just add that for a guy who presents himself as someone disgusted by “racism” and “sexism” and, presumably, “white privilege,” that Adam Kindler has a lot of nerve. After all, few creatures are more annoying than bitchy straight dudes — those educated, well-fed, able-bodied white American males who think they have a right to complain about other people’s oppression, let alone anything else.

(All you really need to know about the alt-comedy “scene” is that the girl who penned the first report praising Kindler’s anti-Carolla rant “received her BA in professional writing and women and gender studies from Elizabethtown College in 2008.”)

Language warning:

Adam Carolla was too busy keeping to his usual workhorse schedule to know or care about Kindler’s speech until furious fans tweeted him over the weekend.

On Monday’s podcast, Carolla responded to Kindler’s “critique.”

For a guy capable of getting mad, and staying that way for years, over stuff like the wrong kind of cranberry sauce, Carolla was pretty sanguine.

(Rant starts around the 2:40 mark):

What do ya gotta do to be a bigot these day? Or homophobic? All I ever say is, everybody should be more like the Jews. Let’s all get with the family, get with the education (…) I don’t feel like that was one of the planks in Hitler’s platform.

I’m flattered by it. I love the idea that someone would just burn these kinds of calories on me. There’s things you can say to me that would hurt my feelings, but you can’t call me short, cuz I’m 6’2” (…)

So calling me a Nazi is obviously insane, so it doesn’t feel like anything. (…)

Here’s what I have to say to the “industry” that was in the audience:

You can all go **** yourselves.

I have a ****ing pirate ship.

[Carolla broadcasts his top-rated, robustly sponsored podcast out of a new studio he built himself.)