Comedian Mark Normand opened up about a behind-the-scenes clash with Hulu over his upcoming special on a recent episode of Tuesdays with Stories, hosted alongside Joe List.
Normand explained that Hulu reached out roughly a week or two before the special’s release, asking him to submit jokes they could cut up and use for social media promotion. He described picking out a handful of bits he liked, only to receive an unexpected follow-up.
“They come back in a week. They go, ‘We got to do a conference call,'” Normand said. “Oh, that’s not good.”
On the call, Hulu representatives told him they wanted to pull a joke about Muslims from the promotional material, though not from the special itself. According to Normand, they cited a previous incident involving another comic.
Normand stated: “Last time a comic did a Muslim joke, we got b*mb threats. We got d*ath threats. They said they were going to k*ll us, ruin the whole studio, blow the place up to smithereens.”
Normand said he pushed back, noting the joke performs well and that the group is rarely touched in comedy. Hulu’s position was that while the material could remain in the hour-long special, keeping it off social media was non-negotiable.
Their reasoning, as Normand relayed it: “Socials is where all the stuff starts, right? You put something on the internet, that’s where the fire kicks up.”
He agreed to remove it on one condition. “I said, ‘I will take it off on one condition.’ And they said, ‘All right, what do you want?’ And I go, ‘I want you to admit on this call that there are dangerous people.'”
The response from Hulu’s team was immediate resistance. Normand described a long silence on the call before they flatly refused, calling the acknowledgment itself offensive.
His reply: “That’s what the call is. You’re calling about this, and I just need you to say it out loud.”
Normand continued: “That’s kind of a microcosm of the whole thing. You can say, ‘Hey, I love this group,’ but then you don’t live near them. We’re all talk. We’re all signaling. We’re all virtuous, but you don’t actually act that way.”
Normand said he eventually got someone on the call to make the admission, though he kept the details light. “I got a group of HR guys to go, ‘Alright, they’re dangerous. We’ll see you later.'”
