Netflix sources, speaking to left-leaning entertainment media, are now fully denying comedian Mark Normand’s claim that one of its executives told him Muslims are “dangerous people.”
The dispute comes after Normand said that Netflix executives told him to cut jokes about Muslims from his comedy special because they were afraid of a backlash to the company, The Hollywood Reporter wrote.
Appearing on the Tuesdays with Stories!, Normand began talking about his Netflix comedy special, Mark Normand: None Too Pleased.
“We got to do a conference call,” Normand explained. “There’s 18 Jews on there with a speakerphone and my Jews. And they go, ‘Yeah, bad news. We reviewed the special again, we’d like you to take out the Muslim joke.’ I go, ‘Oh, why?’ And [they] go, ‘Well, the last time a comic did a Muslim joke, we got bomb threats. We got death threats. They said they were going to kill us. They ruined the whole studio, blowed the place up to smithereens. So we’d like to not use the Muslim joke.’ So I was like: I gotta fight for the joke here.”
He went on to say that the executives later changed their tactic a little by saying they only wanted to remove the joke from social media posts flogging the special, not from the show itself.
“They said, ‘We’ve got to get it off socials… socials is where all the shit starts,” Normand said the executives told him.
“I was like, ‘Okay, okay, I don’t love it, but okay. I will take it off on one condition: I want you to admit on this call they’re a dangerous people. You gotta admit it, or I’ll post again.’ I mean, I’m half joking,” he exclaimed, “and they go, ‘Well, we’re not going to do that.’ And I’m like, ‘Why not?’ ‘Well, that’s offensive.’ And I go, ‘I just need you to say it out loud. I need acknowledgement’ … Like we’re all signaling, we’re all virtuous, but you don’t actually act that way, right? And I think this is a perfect example of that. ‘Hey we’re scared.’ Why are you nervous? That’s what I was getting at. So, they admitted it.”
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But in the wake of Norman’s tale on the podcast, Netflix is denying they ever admitted any such thing.
The streamer told The Hollywood Reporter that, “we advised him that we’re a global company and to be careful with the clips and jokes he used to promote the special on his own social channels.” They added that they never came out and agreed that Muslims were dangerous, adding his claim is “not true, not correct, completely false.”
In fact, they say Normand wasn’t even on the call and that Netflix reps were talking to Normand’s people when to topic came up.
In the special, Normand jokes that his neighbor’s daughter is going through all sorts of phases. “First she went through a promiscuous pothead phase. Now she’s going through a Muslim phase,” he says during the show. “I was like, ‘Hey, she slept with a Muslim, that’s not bad. Now she’s on her knees five times a day for a different reason … He’s like, ‘Yeah, I guess, but you think she’ll stop smoking weed?’ I was like, ‘Well, she’s a Muslim woman. She could still get stoned.’”
After delivering the joke, he then scolds the live audience saying, “Uh-oh, a Muslim joke! You laughed at the Jew shit, just trying to keep it even.”
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