Norm Macdonald Accused Tony Hinchcliffe of Stealing a Joke for Hinchcliffe’s Terrible Netflix Special

MAGA comedian and open mic host Tony Hinchcliffe is currently under fire for performing a poorly received stand-up set at last night’s rally for Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden, but are we really sure that he wrote the “Puerto Rico is an island of garbage” joke all by himself?

In the Joe-Rogan-centric bro comedy community, the most serious allegation a comedian can face (and, possibly, the only damaging accusation a male comedian could ever suffer) is for another more successful comic to accuse them of joke theft. Famously, Rogan ended Carlos Mencia’s mainstream career with an attack campaign that came loaded with a bibliography and a compilation edit of Mencia telling jokes that were eerily similar to bits that comedians such as George Lopez, Bob Levy, Bobby Lee and Ari Shaffir performed first. However, when the late, great Norm Macdonald accused the Kill Tony host who just made front page news with a boring, hack and racist set at Trump’s high-profile assembly of plagiarism, the first person to start performing damage control on Hinchcliffe’s behalf was none other than Rogan himself.

According to Macdonald and his fans, Hinchcliffe lifted a set-up from Macdonald’s famous “Janice” routine and passed it off as his own in his 2016 Netflix special Tony Hinchcliffe: One Shot, a show that was so shitty, unfunny and widely panned that Netflix scrubbed it from the platform just a couple years later.

In a follow-up tweet that Macdonald later deleted, he wrote of Hinchcliffe’s set, “Just was sent the bit. Definitely stolen. ‘Parallel Thinking,’ no. Stolen.” Macdonald also added a half-threatening, half-tongue-in-cheek address directly to Hinchcliffe, “You steal jokes, you pay the consequences. I have friends in low places.”

Whether or not Hinchcliffe’s rewording of Macdonald’s premise constitutes joke theft is up to any comedy fan who has seen both bits in their entirety, but the result is clear — if Hinchcliffe did lightly retool a famous routine by one of the best and most beloved stand-up comedians of all time in an attempt to make his Netflix debut a success, it didn’t work. One Shot was widely mocked upon its release, even among the emerging, vaguely conservative bro comedy community to whom Hinchcliffe would pander for the rest of his career. Hinchcliffe’s awkward, stilted delivery did nothing to complement his amateurish material, and his struggle to show any degree of authenticity or originality in his comedy would be embarrassing even if he wrote all of his own jokes.

Ever since Netflix dumped Hinchcliffe’s disastrous set from their platform, One Shot hasn’t been available to watch through any legal channels, and Hinchcliffe himself has scrubbed any mention of the panned special from his various outlets and bios. Similarly, the Trump campaign has distanced themselves from Hinchcliffe’s set last night, as Trump senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said of Hinchcliffe’s “Puerto Rico is trash” bit in a statement, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

Hinchcliffe probably wishes that he could pin that joke on someone else right now, especially if that person’s passing prevented them from fighting back, but unfortunately, for him, Macdonald typically only wrote bits that were funny.