Adam Carolla’s Anti-Cancel Culture Cartoon Canceled One of Its Stars

Presumably pitched as a “QAnon-friendly Family Guy,” or maybe “King of the Hill, but for that one uncle who won’t say where he was on January 6th,” Adam Carolla’s new animated series Mr. Birchum just hit Netfl– er, DailyWire+, the streaming service run by the right-wing publication that once bemoaned the “hysteria” around climate change, but also suggested that “woke” M&Ms signal the end of world as we know it.

For some reason, Carolla has been clinging to his Mr. Birchum character, a gruff high school shop teacher, for literal decades. It began as a radio voice, later became a Crank Yankers puppet and was eventually the focus of Birchum, a 2011 animated Fox pilot that was never picked up. 

Weirdly, the fact that this mid cartoon character was rejected by Fox 13 years ago has become something of a selling point for DailyWire+, with their CEO bragging that “no network would touch” the show “for fear of offending the wrong people.” 

Which makes it sound like Mr. Birchum is some kind of suppressed work of political provocation, and not a run-of-the-mill animated sitcom that just happens to have included some lame pronoun jokes and catty references to the Green New Deal in a sweaty effort to justify its stale existence with manufactured controversies. 

Perhaps the most contentious element of the show is its casting. Like some kind of Island of Misfit Toys for “canceled” celebrities, the Mr. Birchum cast features Roseanne Barr, in her first acting job since she was fired from the Rosanne reboot for posting Ambien-fueled racist tweets, and Megyn Kelly, who isn’t an actress, but was ousted from NBC for defending blackface. 

Carolla, of course, is an outspoken advocate against the “Orwellian” nightmare that is cancel culture. He once stated, “You should be able to share ideas without fear of being fired from your job.” But… one of the cast members of Mr. Birchum was fired for sharing their ideas? 

Yeah, the original lineup of Mr. Birchum included controversial conservative commentator Candace Owens. Famously, Owens departed The Daily Wire after clashing with its co-founder, columnist and gynecological authority Ben Shapiro over Israel. Soon afterwards, Owens was quietly 86’d from Mr. Birchum and replaced with ESPN’s Sage Steele.

Owens didn’t just criticize the Israeli government, she publicly defended Kanye West’s anti-Semitism and suggested that some kind of “sinister” Jewish gang was running Hollywood. Which is obviously abhorrent. But her firing from the show implies that the folks making Mr. Birchum were totally cool with all the other horrific things she said up until that point, including the time she called the LGBTQ+ community a “sexual plague.” 

At the very least, this incident illustrates the blatant hypocrisy of the anti-cancel culture crowd — and also why you should never watch a cartoon that wasn’t even good enough for Fox, the same network that willingly put The Chevy Chase Show on the air. 

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