Last December, I flew to New York City to see Sam Hyde perform live, along with Nick Rochefort and Charls Carrol, the trio which together form the comedic tour de force known as Million Dollar Extreme, or MDE.
At the time, it seemed like the lads staging a live show might be a rare occurrence, as it had barely happened before, and I ventured into the endless concrete and steel jungle of Manhattan, not even totally sure that the event would even happen, given the proclivities of antifa and other agents of cancellation to find a way to preempt unapproved performances. In fact, those who had purchased tickets weren’t even informed of the location of the venue until just hours prior to showtime, presumably to throw any would-be “disruptors” off the scent.
What a difference a year makes! In 2024, MDE has been well nigh unstoppable, selling out shows across the United States, and even venturing into Canada. There has been no need to keep venues secret, because antifa has seemingly lost its mojo (and perhaps much of its black-budget funding?) lately. Everywhere they go, the MDE crew finds enthusiastic fans and mostly sold-out shows.
One almost forgets that just a short time ago, Sam, Nick, and Charls were resolutely down and out, their Adult Swim TV show “World Peace” having been targeted for destruction by Trump-deranged, humor-policing leftists, their channel subsequently removed from YouTube, all remnants of their short-lived semi-mainstream success seemingly scattered to the winds.
Perhaps worse, MDE was riven by internal conflict, with Charls and Sam in a seemingly unresolvable feud. True, Sam still had his loyal fans, who kept him in the public consciousness with the hilariously ubiquitous “He can’t keep getting away with it!” meme. And Sam was able to keep producing comedic content in some manner on his “Hydewars” channel on Gumroad. Still, few expected this blackballed band of brothers to reunite and claw their way back to the forbidden allure and outlaw prestige that they had formerly enjoyed.
*******************************************
Twenty twenty-two proved to be the year of MDE’s reversal of fortune, featuring as it did Sam’s heavily-watched YouTube punking of Idubbz, when the latter attempted to lampoon and “concern-troll” the former to little avail, followed by Sam’s amusing incarnation as “The Candyman,” a trash-talking Irish boxer who won a fight against popular Australian Tiktoker Iamthmpson at the Misfit’s Boxing event in London, which, being attended by thousands, upped his profile considerably. Then in early 2023, to the stunned exaltation of MDE fans everywhere, Hyde was able to make peace with Carrol, and “the band” was officially back together!
The hits kept coming. In summer of 2023, the trio came into enough money to independently film “World Peace: Season 2,” though its release is still pending. In late 2023, Hyde staged “Fishtank,” an outrageous sendup of the “reality show” format, with Hyde playing the charismatic, flamboyant and unpredictable host Jonah Goldstriker. Additional iterations of of “Fishtank” have run ever since, drawing a fanatical following and having the effect of expanding the already-burgeoning Sam Hyde cult.
*********************************
In December of 2024, almost exactly a year after MDE’s Manhattan show, the troup of merry men came to Atlanta, Georgia, my hometown (though I currently reside in Savannah). I again was in attendance, and this time I brought along my “normie” friend Jonathan (name altered to protect the innocent).
The circumstances for the show were delightfully surreal. Sam Hyde has long had the reputation of being an “alt-right white supremacist,” having often made comedy deemed racially insensitive, perhaps most famously on display in his incarnation as “Peanut Arbuckle,” a character for which he wore an afro wig and prosthetics which made his nostrils appear flatter while displaying a pimp walk and impeccable ghetto patois.
The venue chosen for the Atlanta gig was a place called Uptown Comedy, near the Atlanta airport, an entirely black-owned and black-staffed enterprise. On a normal night of comedy, the talent and most of those in attendance would be black as well… but not tonight!
Some would respond to such a potentially awkward situation with embarrassment, even apology, but the MDE choice was, characteristically enough, to “lean in.” Alex Shultz, the opening act, gave a blisteringly hilarious, ultrahigh-octane performance, in which he pitch-perfectly satirized an unabashedly vulgar, sex-crazed, droopy-pantsed “urban” comedian, who called himself “the vanilla nigga.” Nick and Charls’s acts were slightly calmer (though both touched on wild and wooly topics, especially Charls, the most openly conspiracy-inclined of the MDE-ers), but when Sam Hyde, the headliner emerged for his set, things were immediately ratcheted back up to “11” again.
Sam loves to scream into the faces of audience members, a move that for me recalls another legendary comedian named Sam: namely, the late Sam Kinison. Unlike that Sam, however, who always seemed somewhat performatively crazed, and therefore easier to dismiss as a mere act, this Sam’s aggression seems tethered to something purposeful, after the manner of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, whose harangues have an underlying coherence, even at their most outlandish and bizarre.
On this evening, Hyde spun scenarios of Indian men in a mad rush to rape as many women as possible in the least amount of time on a rickety New Delhi train, before turning the scenario around and making it about older Asian women getting savagely beaten on the subway by “VIOLENT BLACKS!” a phrase he repeatedly yells into the face of one (un)fortunate front row denizen. Yet Sam created a situation in which the young melanin-enriched thugs were actually doing a service for humanity, since the elderly women were in fact malignant entities… or something like that. It was very funny, but also somewhat hard to follow, indicative of Sam’s nimble, bewildering, and supremely mischievous mind.
“You know what they call a ‘cum-coon’? Bill Burr’s wife,” Sam declared, casting an insouciant little smirk at the Uptown Comedy DJ who stood at the back of the stage. The man reacted stoically, displaying no discernible response.
****************************************
My normie friend “Jonathan” admitted that the show was pretty funny, but declined to stick around for the meet-and-greet. While waiting in line to get my picture taken with the lads— something that they do for their fans after every show—I wondered how to introduce myself without sounding lame, gay, or “tryhard.” When it was my turn, I rounded the corner, shook hands with all of them, and announced:
“I’m your Gen-X contingent. My name’s Andy.”
Nick, the consummate salesman, sensed my insecurity over being older than the average MDE enthusiast. “We’ve had a lot of your people,” he reassured me. Charls greeted me by name, while Sam just favored me with a long and respectfully approving look, which— if I am to be honest— made my night. It put me in mind of Nick Carraway’s description of Gatsby’s smile:
“He smiled understandingly--much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four of five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
But it wasn’t Sam’s look that had me grinning so broadly in the picture (see above). Instead, it was Nick, upon glimpsing my “Polska” T-shirt, remarking, “I like a good Polack. I married one, after all!”
Andy Nowicki is the author of several books, most recently The Insurrectionist, Muze, and Love and Hidden Agendas, as well as the just-published The Rule of Wrath. Visit his YouTube channel.