Sam Hyde | |
|---|---|
 Hyde in 2025 | |
| Born | Samuel Whitcomb Hyde (1985-04-16)April 16, 1985 (age 40)[1] |
| Education | Carnegie Mellon University Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) |
| Notable work | Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace |
| Comedy career | |
| Years active | 2007–present |
| Medium | |
| Genres | |
| Subjects | |
| Website | mde |
Samuel Whitcomb Hyde (born April 16, 1985) is an Americancomedian and a co-founder of the sketch comedy groupMillion Dollar Extreme (MDE), alongside Nick Rochefort and Charls Carroll. MDE gained notoriety on YouTube for their provocative, anti-sketch style and public pranks, includingtrolling 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 seriesMillion Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, which aired onAdult Swim in 2016. The show featured surreal, boundary-pushing sketches that contained antisemiticdog whistles, violence, and misogyny and quickly became polarizing, drawing both a dedicated fan base, especially amongst thealt-right, and significant criticism for its controversial content. The series was cancelled after one season, which Hyde attributed to his vocal support forDonald Trump, though others cited the show's offensive material as the primary reason for its termination. He now is a host of the reality seriesFishtank.
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 histransgressive style, by his political messaging and his financial support for neo-Nazi figureAndrew Anglin.
Hyde was born inFall River, Massachusetts, in 1985, and was raised inWilton, Connecticut. After graduating from high school in 2003, he attendedCarnegie Mellon University for one year[2] before transferring to theRhode Island School of Design,[3] graduating in 2007 with a BFA in filmmaking.[citation needed]
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 toYouTube. The channel content consisted of pranks, iPhone monologues by Hyde, as well as "strategically offensive acts of (sometimes public) provocation and anti-sketches".[4] Pranks that were uploaded to the channel includedSamurai Swordplay in a Digital Age, in which Hyde lampooned the Americananime fandom under the pseudonym "Master Kenchiro Ichiimada" at aconvention inVermont, andPrivileged White Male Triggers Oppressed Victims, Ban This Video Now and Block Him, in which Hyde read aloud several pages of homophobic 'research' at acomedy club in Brooklyn, prompting walkouts among the audience.[5][6]
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National attention focused on Hyde in 2013, when he was booked to deliver a talk atTEDx, titled "2070 Paradigm Shift", atDrexel University.[7] Hyde took the stage dressed in a maroon sweatsuit and Roman-stylebreastplate andgreaves and delivered a speech in which he advocated for underwater vegetable farming, wipingIsrael off the map, killing the elderly, and using trash as money.[8] The talk was described byForbes as a satiric impersonation of a "Brooklyn techhipster,"[7] andThe Washington Post described it as subversive brilliance, interpreting the work as a takedown of the TED talk concept.[9]
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.[10]
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 racist discourse. Hyde and Adult Swim emphasized the show's ironic nihilism, but journalists such asBuzzFeed's Joseph Bernstein drew attention to the show's popularity with the alt-right and raised concerns that the ironic nihilism containeddog whistles and could be, and was being, interpreted as racist, sexist, and antisemitic.[11] Following an internal battle in the Cartoon Network (the channel that hosts Adult Swim) over the show's content,[12] it was cancelled after one season.[13] Hyde alleged that this was due to his vocal support forDonald Trump.[14]
In an email toThe Washington Post after the cancellation, Hyde stated that the show included "a secret signal to theKKK, 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.[15] In an interview withThe 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."[16]
In 2017, Hyde pledged $5,000 towards the legal defense fund ofAndrew Anglin, the founder and editor ofneo-Nazi websiteThe Daily Stormer.[17] TheSouthern Poverty Law Center sued Anglin for allegedly organizing a "troll storm" against a Jewish woman in Montana. When Matt Pearce of theLos 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."[17]
In 2023, Hyde launched a live web show titledFishtank (also known asfishtank.live), a 24/7interactivereality show where a number of contestants cohabitate and interact with viewers in real time for six weeks.[18] The program has been compared to theBig Brother television franchise for its format,[19][20] while others have compared it to theStanford prison experiment for its content.[21]
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 inmass shootings.[22] Hyde has played along with this as part of his anti-comedy stance.[23] Some have argued he instigated the hoaxes himself through trollTwitter accounts.[24]
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 thatThe New York Times characterized "Sam Hyde is the shooter" as "an identifiablememe."[25]
The first instance of the prank was the2015 Umpqua Community College shooting.CNN mistakenly included Hyde's image in their coverage of the shooting.[26] Hyde was also labelled as the perpetrator in high-profile shootings such as thePulse nightclub shooting,[27][28]Sutherland Springs church shooting (where he was misidentified by RepresentativeVicente Gonzalez[29]) and the2017 Las Vegas shooting.[26] Hyde has also been erroneously blamed for many other small-scale and large shootings,[23] such as theattempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania[30].
Academics Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx argue that Hyde's act is a form of trolling passed off as satire, where offensive statements can be made to evoke a suitable emotional backlash. In this way the response is itself performative. One group within the audience reacts to what they see, whereas the others in the audience become part of the trolling, enjoying the indignation they see in others.[31] Advocacy groupHope not Hate has described Hyde as a "far-right activist with a history of racism, homophobia, misogyny and spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories", and argues he uses "a veneer of satire to create uncertainty around his actual beliefs".[32] According to Sienkiewicz and 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 "[saying] the quiet part out loud".[33]
| Personal information | |
|---|---|
Nickname | The Candyman |
| Height | 6 ft 5 in (196 cm)[34] |
| Weight | Heavyweight |
| Boxing career | |
| Reach | 81 in (206 cm) |
| Stance | Orthodox |
Hyde enjoysboxing and helped train Canadian YouTuberHarley 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 the2 Fights 1 Night event.[35] 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-wingTwitch streamerHasan 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."[36]
He later went on to traincomedy rapperTyler 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, withWilliam Haynes taking his place, sparking controversy and boycotts from fans of both Hyde and Cassidy.[37] Cassidy accusediDubbbz of removing him from the card due to his friendship with Hyde.[38] 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.[39]
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