‘Weird Al’ Had the Best Joke About Tony Hinchcliffe’s Rally Performance
“Weird Al” Yankovic promises that his show at Madison Square Garden next year will be a lot funnier than Tony Hinchcliffe’s disastrously racist roast comedy set during the Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, which isn’t exactly a high bar — 12 minutes of microphone feedback would be funnier than Hinchcliffe’s “comedy.”
There has never been a better example of how a comedian can succeed without appealing to the lowest common denominator than the decades-long superstardom of Weird Al, America’s most beloved, kind and clean parody artist of all time. Weird Al doesn’t swear, he doesn’t mock and he always secures explicit permission from the A-list musicians whose hit singles he turns into classic parody songs that often supersede the original in terms of cultural impact.
Oh, and on top of all that, he’s not a hack racist who steals jokes from Norm Macdonald just to put out the worst Netflix stand-up special of all time. Weird Al is basically the complete package.
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In July 2025, Weird Al will take the stage at MSG and deliver a performance that probably won’t cause any presidential candidate to immediately tank in the polls in swing states with significant Puerto Rican populations. Following Hinchcliffe's unfunny and politically catastrophic set on Sunday, Weird Al took to Threads (the Nazi-free Twitter) to hit Hinchcliffe with a real roast that’s Göring to leave a mark:
Weird Al’s perfect pun response to the kind of setup that real comedians dream of getting also gained traction on Twitter (Threads but with Nazis) as fans pointed out that this isn’t the first time Weird Al has mined the difference between “less” and “fewer” for a viral joke. Around the release of his grammar-focused single “Word Crimes” on the 2014 album Mandatory Fun, Weird Al went viral for correcting a supermarket’s “15 items or less” sign marking their fast lane.
This means that Weird Al’s Nazi pun has been a decade in the making, and Hinchcliffe’s massive, embarrassing bomb was the catalyst for the longest con of Weird Al’s career. That makes the crickets Hinchcliffe received during his set on Sunday exponentially more embarrassing, and I’d recommend that he should probably lay low for a while after Weird Al hit him with this devastating dunk. I hear that Argentina is lovely this time of year.
