Theo Von’s comedy podcast This Past Weekend has been suspended from YouTube for one week after its June 14 episode featured a controversial interview with Roseanne Barr. On the show, Barr made comments about the Holocaust widely viewed as antisemitic. Barr said “nobody died in the Holocaust” and that “six million Jews should die right now ‘cause they cause all the problems in the world.” Barr, who says she is “all Jewish” herself, later said she was “using sarcasm and satire” but YouTube says the comments violate is content policies. “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech,” says a notice to viewers. The episode remains widely available as a podcast, however.
Since the violation is the first for This Past Weekend, Von’s podcast will only be down from the YouTube for one week. A second violation during the next 90 days would result in a two-week suspension. A third strike would see it permanently removed from YouTube.
Von responded to YouTube’s move by posting the episode on Twitter on Saturday. “My podcast with Roseanne was removed from another platform so I want it to be able to live somewhere,” he said in a Twitter post.
The decision seems to be a savvy one for Von. Despite a holiday weekend, the This Past Weekend episode has had more than 70 million views on Twitter as of Wednesday and earned the attention of Twitter owner Elon Musk. "Comedy is legal on this platform,” Musk wrote in a post.
Von responded to critics last week, writing on social media that his show was under fire by people who did not realize Barr was being sarcastic during their conversation. “A clip taken out of a long sarcastic rant she had during our chat. Can we not recognize sarcasm anymore?” he wrote in a post on Twitter. He also called Barr “a mensch and one of the funniest people” he has ever met.
Whether she was trying to be funny or not, Jewish groups are not laughing. In a statement to the New York Post, World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder called Barr’s comments “grotesque” and “Nazism in its purest form.”
Lauder is calling on podcast apps to pull the episode from their platforms, although it is not believed that any have done so.
The controversy comes just weeks after Barr launched her self-published podcast, The Roseanne Barr Show, this month, inking a multiyear sales deal with Libsyn’s AdvertiseCsat to handle its ad sales.
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