5 Times Charles Barkley Was Funnier Than Every Comedian on Cable
In one year’s time, basketball hall-of-famer and sports broadcasting legend Charles Barkley will retire from television and the women of San Antonio will be able to breathe easy — well, as easy as people of their size ever can.
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With the NBA moving to close a massive, $76 billion broadcasting deal with ESPN, NBC and Amazon, Warner Bros. Discovery and TNT Sports will likely face the end of their time broadcasting NBA basketball at the end of their current deal with the league following the conclusion of the 2024-2025 NBA season. Basketball fans and industry members alike are now preparing for a basketball world without the most celebrated and culturally significant sports studio show in TV history, Inside the NBA, which has featured the insightful commentary and cutting comedy of the Round Mound of Rebound for 24 glorious years.
This past Friday night, Barkley announced that he will retire from TNT after the next basketball season, even in the unlikely event that Warner Bros. Discovery and its CEO David Zaslav somehow secure broadcasting rights to some small package of NBA games with a half-court, multi-billion-dollar buzzer beater. Barkley has been openly critical of his parent company’s controversial CEO since Zaslav acquired TNT in 2022, even citing Zaslav’s past claims that Warner Bros. Discovery and TNT “don’t have to have the NBA” as a deciding factor in the NBA’s departure. But Barkley’s criticisms of Zaslav’s stupidity still don't have anything on his roasts of Zion Williamson and his upcoming trip to Galveston, Texas.
Here are the top times Barkley proved that he’s funnier than any so-called “comedian” on TNT or any other cable network, starting with…
The New Orleans Pelicans Are Too Disappointing for Cancun
The most popular meme response every time a talented NBA team underperforms in the playoffs is some variation of “Cancun on 3!,” implying that the players were so excited for their summer vacations that they purposefully exited the postseason early to get a head start on Cancun. This year’s New Orleans Pelicans flamed out in the first round of the playoffs so unceremoniously that Chuck decided they didn’t even deserve to make it all the way to Mexico — imagine a multi-millionaire choosing to summer in Galveston, for God’s sake.
Lonzo Ball’s Box Score Inspires Chuck to Coin A New Catchphrase
Former Los Angeles Laker and current professional surgery patient Lonzo Ball has battled serious injuries in every season of his seven-year career, but none of them likely hurt worse than when Chuck invented a new way to mock Ball’s single-digit stat line after an uninspiring performance. A triple-double would be a career-defining achievement for most NBA role-players, but coming up with the comically disrespectful phrase “triple-single” is just a regular Thursday for Barkley.
The Phoenix Suns Don’t Have Anything Going for Them — But They Have Plenty of Parking
The soda was flat, the seats were dirty and the nachos came with pickles. But, hey, any time fans of the 2016-2017 Phoenix Suns wanted to watch their disappointing 24-58 team lose a home game in person, they could park right next to the arena. Barkley played in Phoenix for four years during his NBA career, which made his rant about the organizational incompetence of Robert Sarver’s franchise even more scorching than the sun itself on a July day in Phoenix.
Barkley and the Big Ol’ Women of San Antonio
“Everything is bigger in Texas” wasn’t supposed to be diet advice. The most obligatory entry on the list goes to Barkley’s long-standing feud with the women of San Antonio and their “overconfidence” when it comes to their proportions and their portion sizes — San Antonio consistently ranks in the Top 25 most obese cities in America with nearby (for Texas) McAllen taking the top spot, so Barkley’s assessment of the Spurs’ female fandom has data to back up the burn.
“LAPD Was Called!”
When on-the-court tensions between the Houston Rockets and the Los Angeles Clippers spilled into the tunnels of the Staple Center on January 16, 2018, it led to the utterance of words that had never before entered the lexicon of NBA commentators and would never leave the memories of basketball fans. The phrases “po-lice presence” and “LAPD was called” are enough to send any Inside the NBA fan into hysterics today just as they did to Chuck and Shaq six years ago, and we’ll be coming back to this video long after the show ends next year.
