Comedy's Safest Slur Left, right, center— everyone's using it. Why?

IN HIS HBO SPECIAL Panicked, Marc Maron vents about his peers in the comedy industry who voted for Donald Trump out of a supposed desire to protect their free speech.

- 

"All they really wanted was to be able to say the R-word with impunity," he says. Maron then lists a series of horrifying consequences of Trump's reelection, including "the collapse of the federal government, the destabilization of the global economy, tens of thousands of people being deported to places they might not have even come from, the actual suppression of speech and rights of LGBTQ people and women, and the rise of authoritarianism." Finally, he tags the joke: "Sometimes I feel like asking them, 'Was it worth it, you fucking retard?"

Although Maron doesn't name specific comedians in this bit, he has since clarified that he wrote it about a particular strain of comedian-podcaster—the Joe Rogans, Theo Vons, and Tony Hinchcliffes of the world—that skews libertarian and uses The term without reservation. In April, Rogan said on The Joe Rogan Experience that “the word retarded is back” and celebrated its return as “one of the great culture victories” won by podcasts such as his own. Bert Kreischer and Tom Segura shared similar thoughts on their podcast, 2 Bears, 1 Cave, in June. “Everyone says retarded again. It’s in shows; it’s in stand-up,” Segura said. In the 2024 pilot episode of the FX sitcom English Teacher, a pair of dismayed high-school teachers bond over their shared observation that the kids are “saying the R-word again” and no longer “into being woke.” Meanwhile, the new Naked Gun movie features a villain who owns a private club where one of the perks of membership is freedom to say the word without backlash.

The public temperature has shifted noticeably since 2018, when Segura’s defense of the R-word in his Netflix special