Shut Up and Quibble.
Some thoughts on Dropout's political stance taken yesterday.
Hello and welcome to the 16 (!!) new subscribers since I shared my annual New York Comedy Festival Guide last week. The festival starts this Thursday, so be sure to check out my recommendations in advance of the 300+ shows across the 11-day event.
Okay, so.
I try to stay away from anything remotely political here.
But about a dozen people sent me variations of a viral tweet / Instagram carousel post / YouTube community post from Dropout.tv, the self-described home for “independent, ad-free, uncensored comedy” yesterday.
Since this developing story exists at the intersection of digital comedy, social media, and judaism/zionism, I feel like I have to weigh in.
Before we look at Dropout’s viral post and understand what prompted it, I assume about half of you are Googling, “What is Dropout?” in an adjacent tab.
You likely know them by their former name, College Humor.
Here’s what they are today, in their YouTube channel’s own words:
And below that “About” section are a handful of links I would advise them to remove, aside from funneling people directly to the dropout.tv website1:
In the last few years, Dropout created its own streaming service (available on the App Store, Smart TVs, etc.) where you can keep your subscription rent-controlled at only $4/month indefinitely, and reportedly has a subscriber count in the mid six-figures.
All of this to say, here is the post they made yesterday:
Full text (spread across three images):
Image 1: We’ve seen people saying that Dropout is platforming Zionists recently, and we feel it is important to respond. Where Dropout stands is here: Israel is committing genocide against Palestine, and the people of Palestine deserve to be free and safe.
To our knowledge, no individual who has appeared on Dropout has openly identified as a Zionist. Several of those accused have expressed to us their support for a free Palestine. We believe in granting grace for people to become informed and grow, and that views espoused by someone in the past do not always reflect the ones they hold today. If there are individuals who perpetuate speech and actions that go against Dropout’s values, they will not be invited back.
Image 2: On top of bombardment, the death toll and atrocities in Gaza compound every minute as supplies, aid, and food are denied by the Israeli government. Every minute of delay means more lives lost and countless futures shattered. We are donating $25,000 to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund immediately, bringing our total donations to over $200,000, and are planning another Dimension 20 minis fundraiser early next year to benefit a Palestine-focused charity. We encourage everyone to look into what you can give and to reach out to your representatives in government to demand a ceasefire immediately.
It is easy to feel hopeless, but every day more people are educating themselves and joining the coalition dedicated to ending the genocide and the occupation. The people of Palestine have not given up hope despite everything, so neither can we. Hopefully there is a ceasefire soon and the process of healing and rebuilding can begin.”
Image 3: Let's do everything we can to bring about the day when the people of Palestine will be free and safe and prosperous.
Additional resources to support the people of Palestine:
Demand a Ceasefire in Gaza (https://ceasefiretoday.com/)
Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (https://www.pcrf.net/)
UNRWA (https://donate.unrwa.org/-landing-page/en_EN)
UNICEF (https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/children-gaza-need-lifesaving-support)
Gaza eSims (https://connecting-humanity.org/)
This all begs the question: what prompted such a response?
And why is #dropoutboycott a trending hashtag on Twitter, with a Dropout Boycott Demand Letter that currently has 1400+ signatures in a corresponding Google Doc?
Here are the document’s four main demands:
And here is the document’s recounting of the full timeline of events up to this point:
Dropout’s post comes after two weeks of their terminally-online fanbase demanding the company denounce Zionist (derogatory) comedian Noah Grossman (Smosh), who recently appeared on an episode of the Dropout comedy show, Dirty Laundry.
Dirty Laundry is one of Dropout’s original series in which host Lily Du gathers together four guests to tell secrets, guess who they belong to, and play a drinking game c/o a Watch What Happens Live-esque bartender, who fixes the cocktails.
Noah has been labeled a Z*onist by the hypervigilant Dropout community, primarily because on October 7th, 2023, he tweeted this:
The backlash to his tweet was so immediate that he responded with further contextualization (all still on 10/7, mind you), and hasn’t tweeted since:
And here he is replying to individual responses to his follow-ups:
The accusation also stems from an innocuous game of “Two Truths and A Lie” published on the Smosh YouTube channel over six years ago, in which he states his great-grandfather is a founder of Israel, as one of his three possible truths/lie.
Here is how the #DropoutBoycott Demand Letter describes the event:
The document’s hyperlinked instance of Noah, “stating his pride regarding his grandfather’s direct contribution to starting the initial Israeli-Palestinian conflict” comes at the 8:10-8:50 mark of the video:
Again, you be the judge.
Was Noah expressing “pride” in his grandfather’s “direct contribution to starting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?”, like the #BoycottDropout letter suggests?
Maybe my bias is showing, but to me, it kind of seemed like he was… playing a game of Two Truths and a Lie in 2018, and sharing what he deemed to be a fun, little factoid.
Anyone who has played this game as an icebreaker during college orientation week knows that the game should really be called, “Two Weird Flexes and an OK”.
I am trying my hardest to be objective, but the way I see it, someone behind the camera attempts to start a round of applause after Noah reveals this statement to be true, and he adds that his great-grandfather is the only soldier with two monuments in Israel.
His black castmate exclaims, “Woah, you’re royalty!”, and gives him a high-five.
…It was a different time!!
Fans also took issue with Grossman for liking tweets in the wake of October 7th that were considered “Zionist” or “Pro-Israel”.
This is particularly troublesome, you see, because Noah is weighing in on much heavier discourse on Dropout these days.
No longer playing childish games like Two Truths and a Lie on Smosh, he is now chiming in on such divisive topics on Dirty Laundry like …. *checks notes*
“Which one of us faked a celebrity / fan interaction to impress their family?”, and,
“Which one of us got love-bombed by a tattoo artist?”
…
Again – what, exactly, was the problem here?
Noah wasn’t out there sharing propaganda talking points, or incendiary rhetoric.
Was the short form improv comedy show Whose Line Is It, Anyway? “platforming a Zionist” when Ian Gomez, a comedian of Ashkenazi-Jewish descent, did a Hoedown and played “Scenes from a Hat” in one episode of the show in 1996?2
Did the Portland Trail Blazers “platform a Zionist” last night because Israeli forward Deni Avdija dropped 7 points in 21 minutes?
It’s not like the host threw a question to Ben Shapiro, and he derailed the game to make a bombastic claim about the “true story of Sheikh Jarrah”, or something.
This isn’t even as bad as Tucker Carlson appearing as a guest judge on Kill Tony.
The way this Demand Letter and Dropout’s response are written, you would think Noah personally took responsibility for the IDF’s actions while on the episode.
And it’s not like Noah went on their version of Last Week Tonight or The Daily Show, or something intended to be taken more seriously, and espoused some horrific opinions.
Dropout’s response, however, suggests they’re taking the issue of “platforming Zionists” so seriously that they’re willing to enforce an ideological litmus test on all guests going forward.
An interesting move for a platform who makes all its money from improvised comedy game shows, and fake Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. In fact, they recently sold out multiple nights at Madison Square Garden with their live, Dimension 20 shows.
And by the way, why do their fans feel so entitled to control the programming and curation of an independent comedy streaming service?
It’s not like they are shareholders.
They are not constituents of an elected official.
They are not in an employee resource group at a Fortune 500 company.
They pay $4 a month to watch fake, silly, made-up comedy shows.
It costs more to buy two pastrami sandwiches at Katz’s Deli than it does to subscribe to a year of Dropout.
With yesterday’s post, Dropout has positioned itself as a moral authority, implying that their platform is a place for “safe” and ideologically consistent comedy.
This is particularly ironic, considering the Welcome Email I received from them after signing up for a free trial to watch Noah’s episode in preparation for this column:
They said it themselves.
Dropout isn’t CNN+.
Its general audience doesn’t pay $4/month for incisive, political commentary. They pay for a few hours a week of escape from precisely these kinds of contentious issues.
Dropout’s focus should be on expanding their audience, not cultivating an echo chamber of cyberstalkers who demand unwavering adherence to a specific worldview.
Especially when their users are all price-locked indefinitely at an ARPU of $50/year.
If Dropout’s ultimate goal is to make a major exit, they’ll need to appeal to a broader audience, such as people who don’t demand that every guest on every episode of every show on the entire platform has the exact same belief system as their own.
And by the way, their decision to finally address this in the way they did still wasn’t accepted by many of their former subscribers.
Seriously, go look through that trending Twitter hashtag, or the /r/dropout subreddit.
Evidently, making yesterday’s statement, donating an additional $25,000 to Palestinian causes, and vowing to never again platform a “known Zionist” wasn’t enough.
And so if casting two Jewish comedians to play some harmless, one-off improv games is what constitutes “platforming Zionists”, where the only referenced evidence for such claims in the Demand Letter is everything laid out in this article, and your apology statement, donation receipts, and plans going forward still didn’t satisfy your fanbase, well maybe the audience you’re cultivating aren’t anti-zionists.
Maybe they’re just antisemites.
I couldn’t help myself.
For the record, I have no idea what Gomez’s stance on the matter is. I simply went through the Whose Line episode logs until I found a guest star who made one appearance on the show.