Netflix is none too pleased with a claim being made by stand-up comic Mark Normand.
Normand recently told an anecdote on his Tuesdays with Stories! podcast about the streamer’s handling of a sensitive joke from his new special, Mark Normand: None Too Pleased.
Normand claimed Netflix executives insisted he not promote a joke about Muslims on social media, saying it would be too dangerous for the company.
“We got to do a conference call,” Normand says. “There’s 18 Jews on there with a speakerphone and my Jews. And they go, ‘Yeah, bad news. We reviewed the special again, we’d like you to take out the Muslim joke.’ I go, ‘Oh, why?’ And [they] go, ‘Well, the last time a comic did a Muslim joke, we got bomb threats. We got death threats. They said they were going to kill us. They ruined the whole studio, blowed the place up to smithereens. So we’d like to not use the Muslim joke.’ So I was like: I gotta fight for the joke here.”
Normand then says the executives backpedaled, or perhaps clarified, they they didn’t want to remove the joke from the special, but only from a social media promo. “They said, ‘We’ve got to get it off socials … socials is where all the shit starts.’”
Continued Normand: “I was like, ‘Okay, okay, I don’t love it, but okay. I will take it off on one condition: I want you to admit on this call they’re a dangerous people. You gotta admit it, or I’ll post again.’ I mean, I’m half joking … and they go, ‘Well, we’re not going to do that.’ And I’m like, ‘Why not?’ ‘Well, that’s offensive.’ And I go, ‘I just need you to say it out loud. I need acknowledgement’ … Like we’re all signaling, we’re all virtuous, but you don’t actually act that way, right? And I think this is a perfect example of that. ‘Hey we’re scared.’ Why are you nervous? That’s what I was getting at. So they admitted it.”
But a Netflix source strongly denies most components of Normand’s story. The kernel of truth, the source said, is “we advised him that we’re a global company and to be careful with the clips and jokes he used to promote the special on his own social channels.” But the source says the idea that a Netflix executive would portray Muslims as a dangerous threat on a conference call, let alone verbally agree with Normand that they’re a “dangerous people,” is “not true, not correct, completely false.” What’s more, the source says Normand wasn’t even on the call, only his reps. So the idea of a back-and-forth dialogue between Normand and the executives didn’t happen (“It’s an embellishment”).
Generally speaking, Normand playfully mocks all sorts of different groups rather equally. In case you’re curious, the joke — if you don’t mind a joke spoiler — goes like this: “All my friends with kids are just telling me horror stories about theirs. One of my friends has a teenage daughter, she’s like going through all these phases. First she went through a promiscuous pothead phase. Now she’s going through a Muslim phase. I was like, ‘Hey, she slept with a Muslim, that’s not bad. Now she’s on her knees five times a day for a different reason … He’s like, ‘Yeah, I guess, but you think she’ll stop smoking weed?’ I was like, ‘Well, she’s a Muslim woman. She could still get stoned.’”
Normand then comments, “Uh-oh, a Muslim joke! You laughed at the Jew shit, just trying to keep it even.”
A rep for Normand had no immediate comment. Here’s the trailer for his special:
