Kill Tony #793: The Night the Upload Died and Big Jay Kept the Lights On

Kill Tony #793 was an episode about two things that weren't there. One was Dedrick Flynn, moved to special shows the week before, whose absence the comment section treated like a federal holiday. The other was the previous week's episode, which, while this one was being taped at the Comedy Mothership on November 2, still wasn't on YouTube. Big Jay Oakerson was there, though, and that turned out to be plenty.

Martin Phillips opened, as Tony likes him to, wrestling a microphone stand through a minute in which Tony counted fourteen okays. Then Martin told the story of the night: on the road in Peoria, a driver rear-ended his car at a stoplight and ran, and Dedrick Flynn chased the man down and held him on the ground until the police came. A comment with about 1,900 likes calls it the best Dedrick minute ever, which is a fine thing to say about the first episode without one.

The best set came at 46:02 from Colin Sledge, a returning golden ticket winner, with a minute about an ex-girlfriend's insecurities that went somewhere filthy and precise, then an interview about pulling a kitten out of a friend's F-150 engine. It's the moment viewers kept pointing to, and the comments under it call him masterful and underrated.

At 1:01 a bucket pull told the room he hadn't written a minute, and proved it. Tony gave him a one-year ban. Big Jay said it looked like someone had kidnapped the kid's daughter and ordered him on stage, which is the most charitable explanation anyone could have offered. One viewer called Jay's reaction one of the show's best moments ever. Then, after Myles Johnson's first set as a regular, Tony told the room the upload wasn't happening: Redban had uploaded the wrong episode and half-uploaded the right one, about 1.5 million people were waiting, and when Redban blamed YouTube, Tony asked an AI and announced YouTube was fine. By the closing, after Pat O'Neill's set, Tony noted it was the first time in thirteen and a half years they had simply not uploaded one.

The audience had its priorities. The most-liked comment, at about 6,000 likes, promises to watch every ad in honor of Dedrick's departure; the second, at 3,100, jokes about losing your job and believing you got promoted, and several more in the top hundred celebrate a show with nothing to skip. A comment with 2,100 likes says Big Jay carried the episode, and several nominate him for guest of the year. Redban turns up in twelve of the top hundred comments: some joke that the picture got smoother once he stopped editing, some say they feel bad for him, and some think Tony was in a sour mood all night. One viewer offered a defense: last week was the show's first 4K upload, and those can be finicky. RateTony's community score had the episode at 59 out of 100 when we checked. Reddit's r/Killtony blocks our tools, so we couldn't read what's being said there.

Here is Heckle's opinion. Tony was right about the upload, and it was still the funniest unkind segment of the night. The show makes one promise to people outside the room, that it'll be there on Monday, and kept it for thirteen and a half years. But a show built on watching strangers fail in public got to watch its own producer do it live, with the host fact-checking him by chatbot in front of a live room. The viewers feeling sorry for Redban needn't. A man who has hit the meow on a few thousand amateurs can survive one night on the other end of it. That's not cruelty, that's the bill.

As for Dedrick, the parade has been going for a week, and it's starting to say more about the audience than about him. Watching the ads to celebrate a man's absence is the kind of revenge that mostly costs you four minutes of Shopify. And the best minute of the night starred Dedrick as an action hero. Some men are more welcome as a character in someone else's story than in their own minute; most uncles survive Thanksgiving on exactly that principle.

Big Jay earned every guest-of-the-year vote. He's the rare panelist who makes the bucket better instead of funnier at its expense, and his kidnapped-daughter line about the banned set was harsher than the ban and kinder at the same time, because it assumed the kid had a reason. Zac Brown, on his first night on the panel instead of with the band, mostly said nice things and admitted he'd bought two Pat O'Neill shirts, which is what a man with Sphere money does in a room full of comedians. Mike Finoia let Jay drive.

The worry is the bucket. The best amateur moments in #793 came from interviews, not minutes, and the show was carried by a golden ticket winner, a regular and a pro on the panel. One regular out, one in: Kill Tony is trimming fat, and the audience now grades an episode by what it doesn't have to skip. That's a show getting tighter, and a little less like the lottery it sells.

The panel was Big Jay Oakerson, Zac Brown and Mike Finoia. The full episode is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWZjZuzY0CA. It went up on time, which, as of this week, counts as news.