Comedian Theo Von’s podcast “This Past Weekend” became the second-most popular podcast in America after an episode with actress and comedian Roseanne Barr was banned from other platforms.
The podcast episode, which is no longer on Von’s YouTube channel, hit the second-highest spot on Spotify’s U.S. podcast rankings recently after YouTube removed the video for violating its hate speech terms.
According to Variety, Von’s violation resulted in a one-week ban from uploading to YouTube.
The contentious part of the interview involved Barr going on a sarcastic rant about social media censorship, as she remarked about how the 2020 federal election was obviously fair and free. Then, as she continued to be sarcastic, Barr said no one died in the Holocaust.
“‘Nobody died in the Holocaust. It SHOULD happen. Six million Jews SHOULD die right now, because they cause all the problems in the world.’ Is anyone surprised that sicko Roseanne Barr supports Donald Trump?” wrote Jon Cooper, chairman of the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, a super PAC founded in 2016.
“This Roseanne Barr clip was sarcasm folks,” Von said in response. “A clip taken out of a long sarcastic rant she had during our chat. Can we not recognize sarcasm anymore?”
A Twitter community note agreed.
“This is a deceptively edited clip from a comedy podcast. Roseanne is Jewish, and this was part of a satirical rant about censorship on YouTube. She was not actually denying the Holocaust, or wishing death upon Jews,” the note read.
“Theo Von had a podcast episode taken down on another platform a few days ago (and got a strike),” wrote John Shahidi, co-founder and president of Nelk, a video, podcasting, and branding network.
“This has led to a spike in overall downloads including the podcast jumping to #2 on the Spotify charts.”
Von subsequently posted the full podcast on Twitter, and, thanks to a boost from Twitter CEO Elon Musk, the episode had nearly 80 million views on Musk’s share on July 7, 2023.
“Comedy is legal on this platform!” Musk exclaimed.
Shahidi also announced that his brand would be bringing its podcasts to Twitter as a result, which likely includes the “Full Send Podcast,” which has over two million subscribers on YouTube. The podcast famously had an episode with Donald Trump pulled from YouTube, as well.
Von’s banned episode with Barr is still available on Spotify.
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