The Hard Times: The Current Comedy Landscape, The Straight Edge Subculture, and The Room Service Sexcapade

Today on Auxoro, I speak with Matt Saincome and Bill Conway, the founders of The Hard Times, a satire website focused on punk news that has since added a Video Game section called The Hard Drive.

According to TheHardTimes.net, The Hard Times started in late 2014 with just a few punk kids, comics, and friends. In this conversation, we cover everything from the inception of The Hard Times to jerking off to what makes good satire. This was absolutely a wide-ranging conversation, and make sure to stay tuned until the end for some scandalous stories about Matt’s food delivery days.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation:

Bill Burr and Paper Tiger (4:10)

The legality of satire (7:30)

The man who had sex with a dolphin (11:00)

Is comedy under attack? (15:21)

“There has been a rounding down and smoothing out of popular culture to the point where if you don’t one hundred percent fit that general ideology, then you get hammered down a bit.” (19:30)

“One of the reasons why The Hard Times works is because we don’t ask about anybody’s politics before they get into our virtual writers room. Everybody has a blank slate and we pull from a lot of different experiences.” (21:00)

“I used to write for Vice. Vice was started by punk kids and it had that youth culture vibe. Now it seems like their values are more aligned with a Mom who wants to complain to the PTA.” (23:00)

“Anything that has been demonized very heavily in the media, I find myself attracted to it.” (23:37)

The backgrounds of writers for The Hard Times and the open-source process (25:00)

Bill’s venture into standup comedy (27:00)

“My only goal was to not forget my material.” - Bill on his first stand up set (30:44)

The Hard Drive (32:30)

Conan O’Brien’s new show format (34:00)

The difference between The Onion and The Hard Times (36:30)

The genius of Joe Rogan (38:00)

The Milo Yiannopolous incident (42:00)

Cancel Culture (53:15)

The decision to be Straight Edge (58:07)

“A lot of punks grow up drinking and smoking, and straight edge was a reaction to those punks..rebelling against the rebellers.” (58:29)

The closest Matt and Bill have come to “breaking edge” (1:10:00)

Quitting porn and the Pornhub Awards (1:13:00)

The changing Facebook algorithms and its effect on The Hard Times (1:20:00)

The Room Service Sex Proposition (1:34:00)

Some things mentioned in the conversation:

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