Ann Coulter Says Tony Hinchcliffe’s Comedy Central Roast Jokes Were So Bad That Even She Rejected Them

Imagine being so bad at comedy and so irredeemably racist that Ann Coulter thinks she can write a more palatable stand-up set than you. 

Tony Hinchcliffe doesn’t have to imagine it — that’s exactly what happened when Comedy Central paired him with the far-right author and pundit while he was working as a joke writer for The Comedy Central Roast of Rob Lowe. A veteran of the roast circuit, Hinchcliffe fashioned himself as a protégé of Roastmaster General Jeff Ross while working both behind the scenes and onstage for the popular series of celebrity roasts, including the 2016 special where the slate of celebrity guests famously turned the tip of their flamethrowers from the Parks and Recreation to the woman who once called for “Jews to be perfected, as they say” in order to turn America into a true Christian theocracy. 

When Coulter made the confusing decision to guest star on The Roast of Rob Lowe, she unintentionally volunteered to be the night’s biggest target as Jimmy Carr, Pete Davidson, Nikki Glaser, Peyton Manning and Jewel took turns annihilating the controversial conservative loudmouth with the most savage and mean-spirited burns in the history of the Comedy Central Roast series. However, when it was Coulter’s turn to speak, her set was comparatively muted, in large part because she blew off the Comedy-Central-appointed joke writers on the grounds that their material was “dog shit,” in her words.

The Daily Beast recently spoke to Coulter about the infamous roast and the even more catastrophic set that her would-be joke writer Hinchcliffe performed during the Donald Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that massively offended Puerto Rican and Black voters across the country with its racist punchlines. “Whereas I was offended by an unfunny comedian,” Coulter tweeted at the time.

“Comedy Central has a team to write jokes for everyone at a roast, but they were terrible so I wrote my own,” Coulter said of her experience on The Roast of Rob Lowe. Critically, Coulter revealed that she never actually met with her joke writers, saying she had “no idea who wrote” her unsatisfactory set. However, soon after the roast aired and Coulter was front-page comedy news for her role as the night’s punching bag, Hinchcliffe took credit for the roast jokes that one of the most hated and humorless political figures on the planet couldn’t stomach.

“We wanted her to steal the show. We wanted her to do good because that would make us look good as writers,” Hinchcliffe said on an episode of his podcast shortly after roast aired, accusing Coulter of not understanding the structure of such a special. “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.” 

Hinchcliffe also called Coulter “the worst human being I’ve ever worked with in my entire life.” 

Coulter told The Daily Beast of her writers’ response to her rejection, “Apparently my refusal to use their bad jokes annoyed them, though I was perfectly nice about it, not even mentioning that they were dogshit.” Coulter, who spent Sunday night criticizing Hinchcliffe’s failed set, even retweeting someone’s point that ”whoever hired this guy should be fired,” was surprised to learn that Hinchcliffe was the comic behind her horrible roast jokes. “Really?” she said, “That’s odd because I’ve seen some of his jokes online since the rally, and he actually is pretty funny.” 

Still, Coulter stands by her criticisms of Hinchcliffe’s performance on Sunday, saying, “An insult comic was probably not the greatest idea for a campaign rally.” On the other hand, putting a despicable, neo-fascist pundit on the dais during Lowe’s roast was the best idea Comedy Central ever had.