Ann Coulter thought the jokes written for her by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe (and others) ahead of her appearance at Comedy Central’s Roast of Rob Lowe in 2016 were so bad, she threw them out and wrote her own.
In the end, she bombed worse than almost anyone else in the history of the celebrity roasts.
“Comedy Central has a team to write jokes for everyone at a roast, but they were terrible so I wrote my own,” Coulter told the Daily Beast on Tuesday amid the backlash over Hinchcliffe’s racist jokes about Puerto Ricans and others at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally.
ADVERTISEMENT
But while Coulter also says she has “no idea who wrote” her original jokes for the roast, Hinchcliffe took credit on a podcast episode shortly after the event aired in the fall of 2016.
“We wanted her to steal the show. We wanted her to do good because that would make us look good as writers,” Hinchcliffe said at the time, accusing Coulter of being entirely unfamiliar with the roast format. “We sent what I would call a great script in, which I think she would have absolutely killed, and people would be saying about how Ann Coulter killed instead of saying how Ann Coulter bombed, horrendously. We got an email that she had rewritten the jokes, and had made cuts of a lot of the jokes.”
Among Coulter’s many jokes that fell flat in the room were this one aimed at Roastmaster General Jeff Ross: “Why is Jeff Ross at every roast?” she asked. “He thinks he deserves it, everybody else just goes along with it. He’s like Hillary Clinton.”
“Apparently my refusal to use their bad jokes annoyed them, though I was perfectly nice about it, not even mentioning that they were dogs--t,” Coulter added to the Daily Beast.
And yet, when we informed Coulter that Hinchcliffe, who referred to her as “the worst human being I’ve ever worked with in my entire life” on that 2016 podcast, was responsible for the jokes she had rejected, she seemed genuinely surprised.
“Really?” she replied. “That’s odd because I’ve seen some of his jokes online since the rally and he actually is pretty funny.” Coulter previously tweeted that she was “offended by an unfunny comedian” as opposed to being offended by his openly racist jokes, but also retweeted the argument that “whoever hired this guy should be fired.”
“But yeah, an insult comic was probably not the greatest idea for a campaign rally,” Coulter conceded, adding that it was “not [Hinchcliffe’s] fault.”
While Democrats seem to sense that the fallout from the rally could have a lasting impact on a very tight campaign in the final week, Coulter isn’t so sure.
“The left is nuts if they think that attacking comedian—who was one of about a dozen speakers on stage hours before Trump spoke—as a RACIST NAZI is the kill shot,” she said.
