Hollywood comics keep treating Charlie Kirk’s assassination like fresh material for the next big laugh.
The entertainment press barely blinks, saving its fury for comics who aim at the Left.
And Michael Che opened his new Netflix hour by aiming at someone who never signed up for the show.
Michael Che Picked a Grieving Widow for His Warm-Up Act
Saturday Night Live Weekend Update co-anchor Michael Che taped his new stand-up special, Michael Che: Shot in Minnesota, over four shows at First Avenue, the famous Minneapolis music venue. Netflix put it out in October.
He didn’t waste a minute picking a target.
Che told the crowd he felt so good he might get emotional, then reached for the most famous widow in America. “I feel like Erika Kirk on this stage. That’s no disrespect to the Kirks, by the way.”
Sure it isn’t.
Erika Kirk wept in front of tens of thousands of mourners at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, eleven days after a gunman shot her husband at Utah Valley University. Che turned those tears into an icebreaker for a room full of people who paid to laugh.
Then he kept digging. Che claimed he’d never heard of Charlie Kirk before the shooting and figured folks were talking about the starship captain. “I was like, ‘What? They shot Captain Kirk?’”
He said he watched the graphic video of the killing to catch up. “I wish I did not see that ****,” Che said.
But seeing it didn’t stop him from building a whole bit around it. Che scoffed at the explanation that, in his words, “in this country, straight White Christian conservative men are being silenced,” then bragged about arguing the point with somebody he described using the R-word, a slur aimed at the mentally disabled.
He knew exactly what he was doing, too. “I know you shouldn’t use that word, but, I do,” Che said. “I’ll stop saying it when I stop seeing it.”
Trump Voters and God Himself Landed on the Hit List
From there Che swung the same slur at President Trump and the tens of millions of Americans who voted for him. He told the Minneapolis crowd that Trump never would have won if people still used the word, mocked the red MAGA hats, and joked that Trump would make a great kindergarten teacher because he knows how to talk to people who “don’t like to think that much.”
He tossed in a racial slur while joking about the ages of presidential candidates. Because of course he did.
And for his big finish, Che cast God as a deadbeat dad who handed humanity a book and walked out the door. “I ain’t seen him since,” he said.
So that’s the hour. A murdered Christian father, his widow, half the country, and the Almighty. Netflix calls it a fearless special. Folks in Tupelo might call it something else.
Shane Gillis Got the Firing Squad While Che Got a Couch on Today
Here’s where the story gets rich.
Che spent his press tour answering questions about somebody else’s jokes. Shane Gillis hosted SNL in October and cracked a crude line in his monologue about what women wear to the gym. The outrage machine roared to life. Former cast member Ego Nwodim mocked him. Actor Dan Levy piled on. Che even griped on Instagram that every interview would end up being about Gillis.
When Laura Jarrett pressed him on NBC’s Today, Che shrugged it off. “That’s comedy. It’s like, you think it’s funny and then some people don’t,” he said.
Then he offered the excuse he clearly hopes will cover himself. “That’s why I can’t criticize anybody for swinging and missing because I’ve definitely swung and missed, too,” Che said. “I try to keep that heat off of me.”
So he did. Gillis made fun of yoga pants and took days of fire from the industry. Che used a grieving widow as a punchline and got a cozy morning-show segment about his directorial debut.
That’s the rulebook in modern comedy. Aim at women’s gym shorts and the knives come out. Aim at a slain conservative and his family, and the same crowd calls it edgy.
And Che isn’t the first to test it. At Netflix’s The Roast of Kevin Hart on May 10, 2026, Pete Davidson tied comedian Tony Hinchcliffe to Kirk in a joke too vulgar to print here. Netflix kept that one streaming as well. Jimmy Kimmel used his ABC monologue days after the assassination to suggest the accused killer was one of the “MAGA gang,” a claim the record didn’t support, and more than 400 Hollywood stars signed a letter defending him when ABC briefly yanked his show.
Comic book writer Gretchen Felker-Martin posted “hope the bullet’s OK” after the shooting. DC Comics, at least, canceled her series. Netflix keeps sending Che’s hour to living rooms.
Charlie Kirk Would Have Handed Che the Microphone
The cruelest part of Che’s routine is the “silenced” bit.
Charlie Kirk built a career inviting people who disagreed with him to walk up to a microphone and argue. He did it on hostile campuses for years, and a gunman shot him while he was doing it. Prosecutors charged Tyler Robinson with aggravated murder. Robinson pleaded not guilty and awaits trial.
So yes, somebody silenced a straight, White, Christian, conservative man. Permanently. Che played that for laughs.
Now, nobody should claim a comedy special pulls a trigger. That would get ahead of the evidence. But Kirk’s murder came after two attempts on President Trump’s life and the plot against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and every time the entertainment world treats one of those moments as a punchline, it tells the people behind the violence that the cultural elite isn’t all that bothered.
Kirk could take a joke, by the way. When South Park parodied him weeks before his death, he called it a “badge of honor.” The man had thick skin. What he couldn’t do, after that afternoon in Orem, was answer back.
Comedian Michael Loftus, who met Kirk at Politicon years ago, nailed the whole game when Pete Davidson pulled his stunt. “You’re certainly brave about the guy who’s not in the room,” Loftus said.
Loftus also pointed out that comedians love to mock Christians because Christians turn the other cheek. Erika Kirk proved him right in the most literal way possible. Standing before that stadium crowd, she spoke about the man accused of killing her husband.
“That young man, I forgive him,” she said. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and is what Charlie would do.”
Michael Che heard none of that, apparently. Or he heard it and decided it made her an easy mark.
Comedian Bryan Callen put it plainly. “When something terrible happens publicly, and you see somebody killed in front of their children and their wife, I think we need a button that says, ‘Wait, hold on . . .’”
Hollywood never installed that button. And the folks who still go to church on Sunday, wear the red hat, and remember when Johnny Carson could make the whole country laugh without spitting on anybody’s grave keep noticing.
Erika Kirk forgave the young man accused of killing her husband in front of a packed football stadium on September 21, 2025. Less than a year later, Michael Che used her name to warm up a crowd in Minneapolis.
Sources: Fox News, “‘SNL’ Weekend Update anchor calls Republicans slurs, mocks Charlie Kirk in stand-up special”; Fox News, “A year after Charlie Kirk’s murder, some comics are calling out jokes about his death”; TODAY via NBC Washington, “Michael Che reacts to Shane Gillis’ controversial ‘SNL’ monologue, talks new Netflix special”; MPR News, “Comedian Michael Che on Minnesota, his special and that daycare joke”; Christian Post, “Erika Kirk forgives her husband’s killer: ‘It’s what Christ did, what Charlie would do’”; KUTV, “Kirk’s widow forgives accused killer, Trump calls Kirk ‘martyr for American freedom’”; CNN via KSLA, “DC cancels comic book series after writer’s post about Charlie Kirk on social media”
