Trump Rally Comedian Who’s Under Fire Workshopped His Puerto Rico Bit at an NYC Club — And Bombed

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Before podcaster Tony Hinchliffe made headlines for his widely-denounced jokes at former President Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, he tried out those lines in front of a smaller crowd at a club in New York City.

In a report by NBC News, Nicole Acevedo of NBC Latino and NBC coordinating producer Ignacio Torres wrote about a colleague at NBC News and “three other people who happened to be in the audience” at The Stand comedy club on Saturday night — the night before the rally — and saw Hinchliffe workshopping his material:

The joke did not draw laughs, just a handful of awkward chuckles. Hinchcliffe told the audience that he would be performing at the Madison Square Garden rally the next day and said multiple times during his routine that he would get a better reaction “tomorrow at the rally.”

Hinchcliffe went on to perform his material, which included calling Puerto Rico “literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” and said that Latinos “love making babies, too, just know that. They do, they do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.” He also made racist jokes about Black people, anti-Semitic jokes, and misogynistic jokes, though he was reportedly told by the Trump campaign to cut a joke in which he referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “c*nt.”

The Trump campaign tried to distance themselves from Hinchcliffe, saying: “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” The campaign also told Mediaite: “The entire speech was not vetted.”