Fox News Cries ‘Cancel Culture’ When Seattle Comedy Club Scratches Shows Featuring Comics Their Audience Would Hate

According to Fox News, “cancel culture” is when a comedy club that is located in the most liberal neighborhood of one of America’s most liberal cities finally realizes that their target audience might not line up around the block to hear Kurt Metzger’s rape jokes.

Last week, the Capitol Hill Comedy Bar in Seattle, Washington made headlines across the conservative comedy sphere for an email they sent out to four prominent comics who had shows booked at the club for this upcoming spring and summer. Legion of Skanks podcast co-hosts Luis J. Gomez and Dave Smith, VH1 and Crank Yankers star Jim Florentine and former Inside Amy Schumer writer Metzger all received an apologetic notice from Capitol Hill Comedy Bar informing them that the venue had struck their planned shows from the schedule, with the club citing its “progressive values” and negative feedback from “our team, investors, local comedians, and neighborhood advocacy groups” as its reasons for the cancellation. 

Critically, the Capitol Hill Comedy Bar is situated in Seattle’s CHAZ neighborhood, or the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” an area that became a central hotbed of protests and progressive activity following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Metzger, Gomez, Smith and Florentine all lie on the libertarian-to-full-on-Fox-guest spectrum, as is reflected in their stand-up routines, and Metzger is arguably best known for defending both rape humor and a comedian accused of rape in separate Facebook feuds. So to me, the real shocker in this story isn’t that all these Joe Rogan-adjacent comics got bumped from an ultra-liberal comedy club – it’s that anyone at Capitol Hill Comedy Bar ever thought that CHAZ audiences wanted to spend their summer and their money watching a bunch of Gutfeld! guests rant about gender neutral bathrooms.

Following the comedians’ public flogging of the Capitol Hill Comedy Bar, Fox News wrote two articles in two days about the pressing story with two different spellings of the word “cancellation.” In the most recent piece, Fox quoted Metzger’s interview on the conservative talk radio program The Jason Rantz Show, in which Metzger claimed that the Capitol Hill Comedy Bar will go woke, go broke, saying, "They're going to go out of business. They don't have real comics coming in. I looked at the lineup. It's kind of sad."  

Gomez commented on the canceled shows during a recent episode of Legion of Skanks, telling his co-hosts of the Capitol Hill Comedy Bar, “Are they idiots for booking us and then unbooking us? Yes, it’s a dumb move.” Gomez says that the bad decisions didn’t stop there, however, adding, “Is my former agent an idiot for booking me at a super woke progressive venue that like the entire lineup is like… blue haired… freaks?”

This is the crux of the issue – a cursory glance at the Twitter feed of any one of the comedians at the heart of this story should give the average comedy fan the impression that, maybe, Metzger, Gomez, Smith and Florentine wouldn't be well-received at a club situated in one of the most leftist locations in the country that also has regular shows with names like “Queers to the Front.” However, and this is equally important, none of these comics will have any trouble at all booking shows at theaters where audiences actually want to see them following this story – in fact, the publicity they’re getting among the “anti-woke” comedy crowd is basically free targeted marketing.

If I was Gomez’ fired agent, I’d win my job back by booking him on the inevitable Fox Nation “Seattle Snowflakes” stand-up special.