Turning Point USA’s top names gave a lesson in turning crass into class.
On “The Charlie Kirk Show” podcast on Monday, the panel reacted to an out-of-bounds joke told over the weekend at a Netflix roast by former “Saturday Night Live” star Pete Davidson.
Hollywood should have been paying attention.
On today’s show we discussed Pete Davidson’s joke about Charlie’s death while roasting Tony Hinchcliffe. My take: I didn’t like it, and I’m glad the audience wasn’t into it, but there are other “jokes” we’ve seen that are clearly a lot more hateful in intent than Pete’s, and a… pic.twitter.com/NFH8CM69sU
— Blake Neff (@BlakeSNeff) May 11, 2026
(The relevant part of Davidson’s bit can be seen here. But be warned, it’s both obscenely graphic and obscenely not funny.)
Instead, producer Blake Neff summarized it succinctly. Davidson was performing during a roast of fellow comedian Kevin Hart, but taking potshots at other comedians in the crowd as well.
One of them was Tony Hinchcliffe — a man probably best known for making a joke about Puerto Rico during a Trump campaign rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden in October 2024.
Without repeating the obscene comment, Davidson in essence worked a long-running bit about Hinchcliffe supposedly being gay into a reference to the Kirk assassination.
The audience response showed most didn’t find the joke all that funny. And that was the biggest problem, “Charlie Kirk Show” executive producer Andrew Kolvet said.
Recalling when Kirk was lampooned on the animated comedy “South Park” in 2025, he said, it not only cemented Kirk’s cultural status, but it was genuinely funny. Kirk himself apparently agreed, posting snippets of the show on Instagram and clearly enjoying the attention.
(It helped that the “South Park” lampooning was a riot, even if it was typically juvenile, mildly off color, and clearly aiming to bash, not celebrate, Kirk.)
“It’s not that we don’t love humor and we can’t laugh along with actually funny jokes,” Kolvet said.
His problem with Davidson’s line, he said, was not only that he was Kirk’s friend, but the content of the joke itself.
“When I saw the clip this morning, my instinct was, I just cringed,” Kolvet said. “I think comedy can be a really powerful outlet, especially when the culture was getting increasingly woke.”
“For this particular moment, it just felt distasteful.”
Daisy Phelps, a Turning Point veteran, acknowledged Davidson’s life as a professional comedian made him less sensitive to feelings than most Americans. She noted that Davidson’s own father was a New York City firefighter who died on 9/11 and it doesn’t appear to bother Davidson when other comedians make jokes about that.
(Phelps didn’t mention it, but Davidson is also the kind of guy who made fun of Republican Dan Crenshaw because Crenshaw lost an eye while fighting for his country.)
But turning that fire onto others should be a different story, she said.
“I would have loved for him to have thought about, ‘Hey, I grew up without my dad. There are two kids out there who are growing up without their dad right now. The less difficult I can make this on them throughout their lives, the better,’” she said.
Neff meanwhile said he was more outraged by comments in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s Sept. 10 assassination, like those attacking Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, than he was about the Davidson joke. He went back to the point that jokes like this — as offensive as they are — only underscore Kirk’s relevance.
“Charlie is an iconic figure, a very famous figure. Even people who didn’t follow Charlie’s stuff while he was alive, his death was basically the biggest news story in the country for that entire… arguably the entire year,” he said.
“A lot of people are going to have knowledge of that, a reaction to that, an understanding of that moment, and that’s going to lead to comedy.”
“In a dark way, I am happy that Charlie is an iconic figure because he deserves to be,” Neff said. “And it’s going to have a lot of upside. For faith. For revival. For setting a role model for conservatives,” he said.
“But the downside is, he’s going to be a subject of humor. Anything great is subject to humor.”
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