Cum Town Magnifiques

The gender polarization of pop culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s seems unthinkable in the current climate of unisex subversion where men are women and women are men. An atmosphere of masculine pranks and tomfoolery, exemplified by Blink 182, Eminem, and Jackass, coexisted peacefully with the plastic, pornographic femininity of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Pamela Anderson. The boys were as nude as the girls, but under the guise of comedy—something that hasn’t changed in the intervening years, as the heterosexual majority simply can’t take natural male nudity as anything but ridiculous no matter how forcefully it’s marketed to them as gender equality—and this created a free zone of homoerotic exploration that allowed me to have a poster of Blink 182 in underwear above my bed and it not be considered gay.

Cum Town, which harkens back to this era, is a comedy podcast that essentially works like a middle school male friend simulator for lonely millennial guys of the 2010s, a time when male camaraderie is stigmatized as potentially murderous and there are no legally existing spaces for boys to be boys without female monitoring and participation. The tossed off pop culture references—Pure Moods, Austin Powers, Titanic, Maddox, Sega Dreamcast—hit hardest those born between 1987 and 1990. Though there are three hosts, it is a showcase for the unwieldy improvisational genius of Nick Mullen, an Alt-Right-adjacent, seemingly apolitical comedian who exists in the Dirtbag Left New York scene of sister podcasts Chapo Trap House and Red Scare, a milieu that adopts and dilutes the language and symbology of the online far-right while eschewing its reactionary politics beyond the level of “political correctness has gone too far.” Before Cum Town, Nick posted masterful trolling articles on Thought Catalog under the name Nicole Mullen (byline: “Just a fun mom at a retarded school”) alongside pieces by cancelled reactionaries Jim Goad and Gavin McInnes.  When I stumbled on Nicole Mullen, I thought for a whole afternoon that there existed a female troll to beat them all, but was delighted to find that Nicole was Nick, and that Nick was stunningly handsome, with big, sad brown eyes, like a Romantic poet from the Victorian era of whom only one photograph exists. He made several appearances on a Fox News panel show called Red Eye, which aired at something like 2AM, and existed mostly through Twitter, Facebook, and the now-deceased Vine. I wondered how and where such a creature could channel his uncategorizable talents into a work of more sustained effort, and it turned out to be through an uncategorizable podcast which now makes nearly $50K a month on Patreon.

Cum Town is a chatty, low-effort enterprise with little to no form, and episodes have no topics except those that arise organically. The content consists mostly of racist jokes, song lyrics replaced with references to gay sex, and elaborate, extended, satirical Sadean fantasies of celebrities having gay sex with each other, which return and regenerate throughout the episode or the whole series. Batman characters with names like “The Niggler” and “Cumeatsioner Gordon,” who drinks Big Gulp cups of cum, will cross the sky like shooting stars in rapid fire. There is, as the title suggests, a neurotic preoccupation with semen and explicit locker room descriptions of gay sex, which strike heterosexuals as gross-out comedy and homosexuals like myself as murkily erotic. Nightmarish mutations of diverse gender-swapped Hollywood reboots will occur, such as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, with both parents and all the children played by towering negress Leslie Jones, shrunken down and exploring plus-size comedienne Melissa McCarthy’s ass.

A recurring theme is the relentless, cruel mockery of Jewish cohost Adam Friedland, Red Scare host Dasha Nekrasova’s fiancé, mocked variously as “a bug who eats dust” and a shekel-counting cheapskate and placed in numerous Norman Bates scenarios of wearing his mother’s clothes, being cucked by black men who live in trash cans, and having a dick so small that helicopter search lights and megaphones are necessary to find it. The bullying of sweet, mild Adam bleeds surreally into IRL on occasion, such as when Chelsea Clinton put him on blast for an untagged tweet mocking her appearance with what she described as “anti-Semitic tropes.”

Stavros Halkias, the third host, is the most knee-jerkedly liberal of the bunch and frequently drops his dumb sidekick persona to stridently express discomfort when Nick’s jokes or cultural observations have gone too far for the Patreon terms of service. His memorable contributions to the show are mostly in the form of his cacophonous laughter and farting on mic, which scares and repulses new listeners away, and the recurring theme of his chronic overeating and overall bodily decay, which dovetails nicely with Nick’s escalating depression and mental instability.

The early episodes, which begin with unlicensed use of the Home Improvement theme song, are the strongest. Nick has not exhausted his biographical pool of pathetic stories of life as a middling standup comedian in Austin, LA, and New York, living in Chinatown squalor and working at GameStop and cell phone kiosks in malls. In summer 2018, Nick’s mental health deteriorated to the point that he sought therapy and medication and tragically left social media, but not before releasing a series of emotional, vulnerable episodes where his honesty about glimpsing the void after too much cocaine at “Skankfest” is moving and admirable.

Cum Town fans are evenly split between those who like Million Dollar Extreme (right-wing) and those who like Chapo Trap House (left-wing). Both sides argue incessantly about the possible political underpinnings of the show, with the left believing that racist humor and a fascination with The N Word are deployed as nihilist irony and the right believing that the hosts exhibit straightforward awareness of suppressed and forbidden racial truths. Nick hates when his obsessed and frequently unhinged listeners attempt to ascribe meaning to his hundreds of hours of absurdist content, but there are remarkable, melancholic artistic depths lurking beneath the vulgar exterior of this show, which uniquely resonates with alienated young men across the world like myself who view Nick as our generation’s Travis Bickle.