Last week, multiple women came forward with allegations of sexual assault and harassment against New York comedian Aaron Glaser. Their testimonies launched an internal Upright Citizen’s Brigade investigation that resulted in a permanent ban for Glaser, who had previously hosted a monthly stand-up showcase at the famous theater. While Glaser has confirmed his UCB ban, he maintains his innocence on Facebook and has decried the allegations as well as the ensuing “witch-hunt.” In Glaser’s own, since-deleted words, “The Upright Citizen’s Brigade (UCB), without any hearing, without being told who was making the non-anonymous claims, without my being told the facts, background, or given a single chance to say otherwise, listened to the women, and then banned me from their theaters.”
But in this perilous age of P.C. comedy, Hillary Clinton, and Jezebel, who would dare come to Glaser’s defense? Cue Kurt Metzger, the white knight of white male privilege, who gallantly opened his Facebook app to protect Glaser from all those witches. No one combines self-satisfaction with toxic levels of misogyny quite like the rape bro-pologist. But Metzger’s collection of statuses are truly gems of the genre:
“Hey [Glaser]’s guilty let’s start with that! What happens when the next guy isn’t?” he wrote in one update. “Is that just worth it to get rapist [sic]? So sometimes we gotta break a few eggs is that the argument? I know it is. And you think I’m supposed to not have a massive fucking problem with this? You disgust me. And what you want to establish is WORSE than actual rape. Please quote that last line angrily to other imbeciles. Because I so mean it.”
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The stories that surround sexual assault allegations can be incredibly complex. Kurt Metzger’s rants, on the other hand, are completely devoid of nuance. It’s hard to compile a combination of words that conveys just how disgusting that Facebook status is, whether you’re a survivor, a friend of a survivor, or just anyone who has ever experienced pain or empathy. Metzger deserves to be condemned with as much subtlety as his trollish, obvious, and unfunny comedy.
Like many men who self-describe as proud rape apologists, Kurt Metzger thinks he’s a genius, and the rest of us are stupid women. Since the Glaser story broke, Metzger has been retweeting media mentions of his statement, with captions like “I want people to see how right I am.” The writer, who has penned episodes for Inside Amy Schumer, added personalized jibes at female writers and words of encouragement like, “Go fucking blog it, silly hen.” He also helped us out by providing the alternate title for this article, “Amy Schumer Writer Kurt Metzger Something Something The Point Is Bring Up Amy Schumer To Add Weight To Our Nothing Blog.”
Two nights ago, Metzger tweeted, “I mean I know I’m a man and therefore am disposable at your whim. But just try reading my actual points instead of making them up.” Since I’m a sucker for mansplaining, I decided to follow Metzger’s advice on how to do my job. That left me with the unenviable task of reading through years of Metzger’s “actual points” on the internet, each grosser and more misogynistic than the last.
Many trolls feel comfortable commenting endlessly on other people’s personal lives, but are less loquacious when it comes to their own. Kurt Metzger is not that kind of troll. In response to a Facebook post on Chris Brown and Rihanna’s relationship, Metzger wrote that Rihanna was a “dumb bitch,” and that “if you’re attracted to chris brown you deserve what you get.” Apparently, the same logic applies to Metzger, who went on to recall the time when “I had an ex smash all my shit with a hammer because she was insane and I choked her. Not really hard, but definitely criminally…I should have manned up and left this psycho before she got to destroying my things.”
Back in 2013, Metzger launched an online harassment campaign against writers Lindy West and Sady Doyle for their critiques of rape humor in comedy. The bloggers claim that Metzger personally targeted them by making impersonator accounts on social media and filling them with obscene Photoshops of his chosen victims. When West publicly called the Inside Amy Schumer staff writer out, she received a flood of hate mail from online trolls, as well as renewed vitriol from Metzger himself. In his ensuing Facebook comments, Metzger argued that the one in four statistic for unwanted sexual contact is “more like 1 in 14”; and that the legitimate statistic is actually just “an old feminist lie.” Well, “not all feminists. A certain kind. Let’s call her a cunt.”
Metzger has a history of attacking women online—sometimes in a misguided attempt to get them to appear on his podcast, and sometimes just for fun. In 2015, Twitter user @literalporn was involved in an exchange with a totally unrelated comedian, during which she tweeted, “HOW COME UNFUNNY WHITE BOYS ALWAYS COMPLAINING ABOUT CAPS LOCK.” Kurt Metzger, apparently not one to leave a stranger’s rhetorical question unanswered, proceeded to aggressively and loudly slide into @literalporn’s DMs. She told journalists that “his tweets [ranged] from misogynistic slut shaming to racist.” But a cursory glance at some screenshots shows that some of these Tweets were both misogynistic AND racist: “You’re a dumb racist and being called ‘white boy’ is the worst insult in your world. I think an asian faking black is worse, rachel doledong.” @Literalporn then turned to her Twitter inbox and found “these lengthy messages where he tries to [play] nice after the fact and invites me on his podcast,” claiming, in his words, “I’m not like the other ‘white boys’ haha. I came out of the philly black comedy circuit.” If you thought that listing your black friends was a copout, check out this white dude who thinks that performing in Philly is a legitimate racism rebuttal.
YouTube personality Gaby Dunn has a remarkably similar story; after she tweeted about comments that she found transphobic, “Metzger started tweeting me/started a campaign to get me on his podcast by harassing me. Luckily, I had him pre-emptively blocked because I knew of his treatment of women. This seemed to further enrage him.”
To misquote Madeleine Albright, there’s a special place in hell reserved for male comedians who think that “P.C. culture” is a bigger threat to comedy than personal assaults on female comedians. Sady Doyle took a necessary next step by attempting to contact Amy Schumer, Metzger’s employer, a woman who has been lauded as a bastion of feminist comedy. Doyle tweeted, “So it’ll be fun to see if @amyschumer or @comedycentral take steps to correct the problem.” Metzger’s response to her? “They gave me a raise. Does that count?”
On one hand, it seems problematic to go after Amy Schumer for Kurt Metzger’s crimes. That being said, as his chief comedy benefactor, Schumer tacitly condoned this despicable behavior. The consistently feminist content that Schumer produces on Inside Amy Schumer, which includes radical commentary on sexual assault and Internet age misogyny, might result in fans holding Schumer to an unfairly high standard. But Metzger’s behavior should fall below any and all reasonable standards for employment—the fact that he works for one of TV’s most groundbreaking shows, and for a woman who has bravely and honestly written about her own experience with sexual assault and intimate partner violence, just makes this whole story stranger.
Metzger’s latest transgression and the public backlash that followed finally captured Schumer’s attention. After blocking Twitter users who criticized Metzger as recently as Tuesday, Schumer changed her tune on Wednesday, tweeting, “I am so saddened and disappointed in Kurt Metzger. He is my friend and a great writer and I couldn’t be more against his recent actions.” She continued, “Kurt does not work for me. He is not a writer on my show. Please stop asking me about it. His words are not mine.”
If Metzger is no longer a writer on Inside Amy Schumer, then someone should really tell Metzger. According to IMDb, the comedian is credited as a writer on all 39 of the show’s episodes. In the past, he’s bragged about working for the feminist hit, saying, “Amy’s smart in how she picked the writers. She got really diverse sensibilities, so it’s not ‘A Chick Show.’” Nice to see a man admit that his infinitely more famous female boss might actually be good for something: hiring male writers on her show. On Tuesday, he tweeted, “U can try to get me fired u can try to impersonate me u can send me a mean boo boo tweet. It’s utterly meaningless. My points are dead on.”
Schumer further shook the comedy community in another follow-up Tweet late Wednesday night, claiming, “I didn’t fire Kurt. He isn’t a writer for my show because we aren’t making the show anymore. There are no writers for it.” When distraught Inside Amy Schumer fans asked for clarification, Amy added that she’s taking some time to focus on her stand-up and writing, but confirmed that the show would eventually be back for Season Five—just not “in the foreseeable future.” Metzger, having come to the realization that he is, in fact, expendable, took to Facebook to claim that he “specifically told [Schumer] to do exactly what she did.” He continued, “At the very least maybe my first name will stop being ‘Amy Schumer Writer.’”
