Sam Hyde

Samuel Whitcomb Hyde (born April 16, 1985) is an American comedian, a co-founder of the sketch comedy group Million Dollar Extreme (MDE), alongside Nick Rochefort and Charls Carroll. Born in Massachusetts and raised in Connecticut, Hyde graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in filmmaking. MDE gained notoriety on YouTube for their provocative, anti-sketch style and public pranks, including trolling staged performances at conventions and comedy clubs that pushed social boundaries and courted controversy. Widespread public attention followed one such satirical TEDx talk.

Hyde and MDE created the television series Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, which aired on Adult Swim in 2016. The show featured surreal, boundary-pushing sketches that contained anti-semitic dog whistles, violence and misogeny, and quickly became polarizing, drawing both a dedicated fan base, especially amongst the alt-right, and garnered significant criticism for its controversial content. The series was cancelled after one season, which Hyde attributed to his vocal support for Donald Trump, though others cited the show's offensive material as the primary reason for its termination. He now is a host of the reality series ''Fishtank''.

Hyde is the subject of a recurring internet hoax in which he is falsely identified as the perpetrator of various mass shootings and terrorist attacks by online trolls, and he has played along with this hoax. His career has been defined by his willingness to provoke outrage through his transgressive style, by his political messaging and his financial support for a far right figure.

Life and career

Hyde was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1985, and was raised in Wilton, Connecticut. After graduating from high school in 2003, he attended Carnegie Mellon University for one year, before transferring to the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2007 with a BFA in filmmaking.

''Million Dollar Extreme''

Hyde, along with fellow comedians Nick Rochefort and Charls Carroll, founded the sketch comedy group Million Dollar Extreme (MDE) in 2009, and began uploading videos to YouTube. The channel content consisted of pranks, iPhone monologues by Hyde, as well as "strategically offensive acts of (sometimes public) provocation and anti-sketches". Pranks that were uploaded to the channel included ''Samurai Swordplay in a Digital Age'': in which Hyde lampooned the American anime fandom under the pseudonym "Master Kenchiro Ichiimada" at a convention in Vermont, and ''Privileged White Male Triggers Oppressed Victims, Ban This Video Now and Block Him'' in which Hyde read aloud several pages of homophobic 'research' at a comedy club in Brooklyn: prompting walkouts among the audience.

In 2014, Hyde started a fake Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the creation of a "pony dating simulator" for bronies. Devotees of the show who ostensibly took the project seriously pledged a total of $4,161 to the fundraiser before Hyde cancelled it.

TED talk

National attention focused on Hyde in 2013, when he was booked to deliver a talk at TEDx, titled "2070 Paradigm Shift", at Drexel University. Hyde took the stage dressed in a maroon sweatsuit and a Roman style breastplate and greaves and delivered a speech in which he advocated for underwater vegetable farming, wiping Israel off the map, killing the elderly, and using trash as money. The talk was described by ''Forbes'' as a satiric impersonation of a "Brooklyn tech hipster," and ''The Washington Post'' described it as subversive brilliance, interpreting the work as a takedown of the TED talk concept.

''Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace''

With this increased exposure, Adult Swim premiered a television program in August 2016, '' Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace.'' The show was co-written by Hyde, and he acted in it along with the other members of MDE.

The series consisted of six eleven-minute episodes that contained anti-sketches, deliberately cheap performances, amateur acting and video segments including pranks. Sketches were deliberately provocative, with characters suffering violent abuses such as crashing through walls and tables, and being subjected to misogynistic and racists discourse. Hyde and Adult Swim emphasized the show's ironic nihilism, but journalists such as Buzzfeed's Joseph Bernstein drew attention to the show's popularity with the alt-right, and raised concerns that the ironic nihilism contained dog whistles and could be, and was being interpreted as racist, sexist and antisemitic. Following an internal battle in the Cartoon Network (the channel that hosts Adult Swim) over the show's content, it was cancelled after one season. Hyde alleged that this was due to his vocal support for Donald Trump.

In an email to ''The Washington Post'' after the cancellation, Hyde stated that the show included "a secret signal to the KKK, which is actually where a lot of my YouTube ad revenue comes from"; he also insisted that he was not being sarcastic, and that while he had kept the connection a secret, he could openly talk about the KKK once the show had been cancelled. In an interview with ''The Hollywood Reporter'' in the aftermath of his series' cancellation, when questioned if he held a bias towards minorities, Hyde replied: "No, I wouldn’t say that. I would say that I’m probably as racist or as biased as the average regular white guy or the average regular black guy."

2017-present

In 2017, Hyde pledged $5,000 towards the legal defense fund of Andrew Anglin, the founder and editor of neo-Nazi website ''The Daily Stormer''. The Southern Poverty Law Center sued Anglin for allegedly organizing a " troll storm" against a Jewish woman in Montana. When Matt Pearce of the ''Los Angeles Times'' questioned Hyde about the donation, Hyde asked Pearce if he was Jewish and went on to say that $5,000 was "nothing" to him. Hyde also stated: "Don't worry so much about money. Worry about if people start deciding to kill reporters. That's a quote. For the reason why, you can say I want reporters to know I make more money than them, especially Matt Pearce."

''Fishtank''

Hyde launched a live reality web show ''Fishtank'' (also known as ''fishtank.live''). This is a 24/7 interactive reality show where a number of contestants cohabitate and interact with viewers in real time for six weeks. The program has been compared to the '' Big Brother'' television franchise for its format, while others have compared it to the Stanford prison experiment for its content.

Misidentification hoaxes

Fans of MDE responded to the trolling content of the show by using photos of Hyde, its creator, to convince multiple media outlets of his involvement in mass shootings. Hyde has played along with this, as part of his anti comedy stance. Some have argued he instigated the hoaxes himself through troll Twitter accounts.

The hoaxes, which typically included photos of Hyde brandishing a semi-automatic weapon and with a slightly altered name to appear more "authentic", reappeared so often on social media that ''The New York Times'' characterized "Sam Hyde is the shooter" as "an identifiable meme."

The first instance of the prank was the 2015 Umpqua Community College shooting. CNN mistakenly included Hyde's image on their coverage of the shooting. Hyde was also labelled as the perpetrator in high profile shootings such as the Pulse nightclub shooting, Sutherland Springs church shooting (where he was misidentified by Representative Vicente Gonzalez) and the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. Hyde has also been erroneously blamed for many other small scale and large shootings, as well as the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

Reception

According to academics Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx, Hyde's act is a form of trolling passed off as satire, with the argument that offensive statements can be made to evoke a suitable emotional backlash. In this way the response is itself performative. One group within the audience react to what they see, whereas the others in the audience become part of the trolling, enjoying the indignation they see in others. Advocacy group Hope not Hate have described Hyde as a "far-right activist with a history of racism, homophobia, misogyny and spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories", and argue he uses "a veneer of satire to create uncertainty around his actual beliefs". According to Sienkiewicz & Marx, as of 2024 Hyde had made it "increasingly hard to believe his anti-Semitism is anything short of sincere by continuously railing against Jewish comedians whom he believes conspire to blackball him", describing his 2017 donation to Andrew Anglin as "ayingthe quiet part out loud".

Boxing

Hyde enjoys boxing and helped train Canadian YouTuber Harley Morenstein for iDubbbz's charity boxing event ''Creator Clash''. On August 27, 2022, Hyde made his boxing debut, defeating Australian social media star James "IAmThmpsn" Thompson during the ''2 Fights 1 Night'' event. Throughout fight week press conferences, Hyde adopted an Irish persona dubbed "The Candyman". In this persona, he spoke in a thick Irish accent, wore bizarre Irish-related clothing and a mask, and read candy-centric poems. Hyde defeated Thompson in the third round by TKO. After the fight, Hyde called out left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker by threatening to murder him at his house, while remaining in-character as the Candyman, saying "I am going to stalk him and become obsessed with him, and wear his makeup, and his dresses, and use his skin as a coat like the ancient Irish did."

He later went on to train comedy rapper Tyler Cassidy for his match against Chris Ray Gun for the second Creator Clash, scheduled for April 15, 2023. Weeks prior to the event, Cassidy was removed from the lineup of fighters, with William Haynes taking his place, sparking controversy and boycotts from fans of both Hyde and Cassidy. Cassidy accused iDubbbz of removing him from the card due to personal grudges against Hyde that stem from the filming of the documentary ''Getting Away With It''. According to Cassidy and many fans of both creators, a potential major factor was that he had previously made jokes about subscribing to iDubbbz's wife's OnlyFans. In a video uploaded by iDubbbz titled "Addressing the Froggy Fresh Drama", he criticizes Hyde for relentlessly harassing him, his wife Anisa Jomha, and other influencers who have fought on Creator Clash, such as Nathan Barnatt.

Publications

Books
* ''How to BOMB the U. S. Gov't: The OFFICIAL Primo(tm) Strategy Guide to the Collapse of Western Civilization'', with Nick Rochefort and Charls "Coors" Carroll. COM98 LLC (2016). .

Filmography

Television
* '' Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace'' (2016, 6 episodes) – various, creator, screenwriter, producer

Notes

References

Bibliography

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Hyde, Sam
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
People from Fall River, Massachusetts
American male comedians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American television writers
American performance artists
American sketch comedians
American stand-up comedians
Carnegie Mellon University alumni
Rhode Island School of Design alumni
Comedians from Massachusetts
Screenwriters from Massachusetts
21st-century American comedians
American male television writers
Internet hoaxes
Internet memes introduced from the United States
American conspiracy theorists
Wilton High School alumni
YouTubers from Massachusetts
YouTubers from Connecticut
People from Wilton, Connecticut
Comedians from Connecticut