Not only do they not need the money, but many of the comics billed have spent the last decade-plus fashioning themselves as the vanguard of free speech, decrying backlash to bigoted jokes as tantamount to the very sort of state repression they are now endorsing.
Chappelle released multiple Netflix specials containing transphobic jokes, declaring himself “team Terf”. Afterwards he defended the material to a room full of schoolchildren: “The more you say I can’t say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it,” he said. Jeff Ross once described the celebrity roast as “one of the last bastions of free speech”, and speculated a few years ago that his friend Norm Macdonald died because he did not want to live in a world where “everyone’s trying to cancel everybody.” Andrew Schulz, who has used racist and anti-transgender language in the recent past, recently criticized the right for abandoning its values as “the party that ended cancel culture, the party that is keeping free speech alive”. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Whitney Cummings posted: “If you are happy someone was publicly executed because they don’t share your beliefs congrats you’re the Taliban.” (Incidentally, Human Rights Watch notes that the Saudi regime executed a journalist in June “because of his peaceful speech and commentary.”)
