Kill Tony #792: The Dark Storm Passes, and the Comments Throw a Parade

There are two ways to leave a job. You can be fired, or you can be told you're too important to come in anymore. Kill Tony #792 chose the second one for Dedrick Flynn, and the comment section chose the first one for him, loudly and in great numbers. If you want to know how the episode went, I'd say it went fine for everyone except a man celebrating his anniversary.

The episode was recorded October 26 with Jimmy Carr on the panel for the seventh time, next to Luis J. Gomez and Steve Rannazzisi, and it reached YouTube late, after 10 p.m. Pacific on Monday. That's after one in the morning on the East Coast, which meant the faithful who sit up refreshing on Monday night got their Kill Tony with their Tuesday breakfast instead. The most-liked comment under the episode, at nearly eight thousand likes, is a fan shouting that they're ready for the best Tuesday morning of their lives. Another reminded Tony that he likes to say he's never missed a Monday. A show built on brutal honesty can't complain when it gets some.

The night opened with Nicole Tran, a golden ticket winner from eight or nine years ago in San Francisco, who came back and finished with a Halloween song the panel asked to hear again. Then the bucket. Mohamed from Des Moines told the room he came to America through the U.N., says he was once stabbed with a nail clipper in Egypt, pours samples at Whole Foods and has a father with five wives. Tony sent him home with a big joke book, and the comments decided Tony may have saved a life with it. Jesse Lane told a story about her brother failing a police academy swim test with no punchline at the end, and Steve Rannazzisi guessed the missing word was hypocrisy, which put him, according to Tony, up two hundred points. Carmen Siracillo, a 40-year veteran who started in Cleveland and spent decades doing Italian restaurants in Florida, did a nightstand bit and told mafia-uncle stories, and the panel called a 40-year veteran on Kill Tony fantastic. It was, and it was the best thing in the bucket.

Then Tony brought out Dedrick Flynn, who on episode 743 went from first-time bucket pull to regular in a single night and had done a brand new minute every week since. It was his one-year anniversary. He did three minutes and 25 seconds about grocery bags, the TSA and football. And then it was announced that Dedrick will only be performing on special shows from now on, in arenas. Dedrick thanked everyone, listed six arenas, 37 theaters and more than 350 shows since he got on, and said he wanted to make room for the new people. According to a comment with nearly two thousand likes, Redban hit the meow during the farewell. It was, as goodbyes go, the warmest way anyone has ever been shown the door.

The comment section did not cry. The second most-liked comment, at 6,400 likes, is a viewer who says they skipped Dedrick every week for exactly one year. Another, at 5,600, admires the idea of making him think he got promoted instead of fired. Then came the weather reports. Dozens of commenters, calling him the dark storm, announced that the dark storm had passed and the sun would shine again, and they kept announcing it, a few hundred likes at a time, like a town that's been waiting for the rain to stop since last November. The timestamps people left cluster at 53:25 to 56:15, the announcement and the farewell, which tells you which three minutes this audience will be rewinding. One comment with nearly 500 likes noticed the other half of the story: Tony let one regular go and got a funny new one the same night. That was Miles Johnson, who was made a regular after his set about a worm farm.

Over on r/Killtony, the mood was more mixed than the YouTube parade. The threads have headlines like “Dedrick hate is misplaced” and “Double the amount of regulars,” and one is headlined that Dedrick says the decision to step back was his. Reddit doesn’t let us read past the headlines, so take them for what they are: proof that somewhere on the internet, Dedrick has defenders, and they’ve organized.

Here is Heckle's opinion, for what an opinion is worth on a Tuesday morning. The send-off was right and the comments are a little cruel, and both things can be true. Dedrick did a new minute every week for a year in front of the most impatient crowd in comedy; most comics don't do a new minute every month in front of their mothers. But Kill Tony isn't a charity, it's a meat grinder with a band, and a regular who gets skipped for a year isn't a regular, he's a commercial. The genius of it is the arenas line. Nobody got fired. A man got promoted to a place where nobody has to watch him on Monday. That's not cruelty, that's management.

The real winner was the panel. Carr, Gomez and Rannazzisi worked like they'd done it together for years, and Gomez, who Tony says now holds the record for most appearances on the show, looked like a man who could do this in his sleep and may have. If this is what the show looks like when it clears out the dead minutes, then the forecast, as the comments keep insisting, really is sunny. It always is, the morning after somebody else's storm.