Two Comedians Bump Into A War
Two Jewish comedian-podcasters bump into a war. Their hard-core fans demand some jokes about it. After all, aren’t comics supposed The post Two Comedians Bump Into A War appeared first on Moment Magazine.
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Two Jewish comedian-podcasters bump into a war. Their hard-core fans demand some jokes about it. After all, aren’t comics supposed to take us to the edge?
The comic on the left, Gianmarco Soresi, is a half-Italian, half-Jewish 37-year-old who was singled out by The New York Times for making the best YouTube comedy special of 2025. The Brooklyn-based Soresi also hosts the podcast The Downside, and had made his Jewish identity part of the show and his act even before the Gaza war. “I am Jewish,” he said on James Corden’s Late Late Show in 2022. “I don’t make a big deal of it—unless I’m losing an argument to a person of color.”
Within weeks after the Hamas attack in 2023, Soresi was building material that made clear his opposition to Israel’s tactics in Gaza. In a clip from one of his standup shows he recounts how his Israeli barber was trimming Soresi’s beard and “the closer the blade got to my throat, the more I became pro-Israeli. That’s how it feels talking about that conflict while wanting to succeed in Hollywood.” That scored laughs, but still, Soresi worried aloud: Was he alienating half (or more) of his potential audience with that bit?
A step toward the right, Sam Morril, 39, asks himself that same question from a different perspective—he’s not sure anybody should particularly care what comedians’ views are on thorny political issues. In the first weeks after the Hamas attack, he scoffed at the very idea of random people going on social media to promote their personal stance on the war. “As a Jew, I’m horrified by what’s happening in the Middle East,” he says in a video posted on TikTok, adding, “I could really do without some of the dumbest people on social media’s opinions on it. When you see someone tweet, ‘What they need to do is…’ I’m like, ‘Oh, the most complex dispute in history, and you’ve gotten to the bottom of it? A bodybuilder from Tampa? Thanks.”
But there was no escaping the issue. When Morril posted a joke about the war on social media, it got “more engagement than anything I’ve ever posted,” he told Decider. Still, he was reluctant to risk angering half his audience. “For me, it’s been difficult,” he said. “It’s got to be a killer joke.”
Even when Morril wasn’t talking directly about the war, it poked its way into his show. After he told a Jeffrey Epstein joke in a club in Omaha, a woman in the front row started repeatedly shouting “Free Palestine!”
“Yeah? Calm down,” Morril replied.
“We’re Irish,” the woman said.
“Yeah, I can tell by the lack of self-control,” the comedian shot back. “I got one for you: How about ‘Free you from my f—ing audience tonight?’
The moment went viral, a token of success for any comic, but Morril didn’t like the idea of winning audiences by insulting them. In general, “when you have a joke, you stretch it as possibly far as you [can] take it,” he said on fellow comedian Trevor Noah’s podcast What Now? in November. “My goal is to kill the room and be who I am’…I always saw myself trying to bring the room together, like, finding common ground.”
Opening image credit: Gianmarco Soresi (left and Sam Morril (right). Credit: Philip Romano Photo (CC BY-SA 4.0) / Ralph_PH (CC BY 4.0)
The post Two Comedians Bump Into A War appeared first on Moment Magazine.
