ADAM CAROLLA PREMIERS NEW ANTI-WOKE SHOW WITH ROSEANNE BARR, MEGYN KELLY
Circa 1994, a wannabe comedian by the name of Adam Carolla was wondering how to get on radio and asked his new friend, Jimmy Kimmel, a regular on the Kevin and Bean Show at KROQ in Los Angeles, for advice.
"Come up with a character," Kimmel told him.
So Carolla created a wood-shop teacher who loved working with wood but hated working with kids, and he played the character multiple times in the 1990s alongside radio jocks Kevin Ryder and Gene "Bean" Baxter.
Fast-forward 30 years, and his cantankerous character is returning in an animated TV show called Mr. Birchum, starring Carolla as the title character with journalist Megyn Kelly as his wife and comedian Roseanne Barr as the school principal.
Mr. Birchum will debut Sunday at the streaming service of the conservative media outlet The Daily Wire, best known for its podcasts starring Ben Shapiro but also as a landing spot for movies and TV shows that shun so-called "woke-ness" and are often deemed politically incorrect by detractors on the left.
The Daily Wire on Tuesday hosted a Hollywood-style premiere for its new show, shunning the traditional red carpet for one made of wooden planks, at Academy LA, a trendy nightclub in Los Angeles.
"It's from liberals that we learned to use comedy to challenge the status quo," Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing told Newsweek when asked if liberals will tune in to the show.
"Now, they're the establishment and we're using their tools. If nothing else, liberals might want to tune in to remember what it was like to laugh at those in power," he said.
Barr told Newsweek that she was simply "so excited to be able to offend people again. That's what I've missed."
In the episode featured Tuesday night, Birchum is forced to defend his job from the school's new justice, equity, diversity and inclusion officer who goes by the acronym JEDI and rides a scooter with the license plate: "LGBTQIA2S+XRW%*"
"I'm a heteronormative, cisgendered, white male, for which I apologize," he tells Birchum when they first meet. "Do I have consent to shake your hand?"
When a girl in his wood-shop class says she is "triggered" by Birchum's odd system of ascribing demerits to unruly students, he informs her: "You can't use the word 'triggered' if you've never actually fired a weapon."
Later, it's revealed that the new JEDI has been searching "Nancy Pelosi bikini pics" on his phone. And when he demands that Birchum stop showing a safety film called Blood on the Bandsaw, the directive is wholly ignored. That incident, among others, pave the way for the episode's climactic scene —a competency hearing for Birchum.
"Society is obviously different now than it was 30 years ago, but Birchum's complaints are the same," Carolla told Newsweek ahead of the premiere. "You read quotes from 200 years ago, and people are saying, 'What's wrong with kids today?' The show is kind of like that. He's an old-school guy trapped in a new-school world."
Carolla said future issues of the show will deal with the U.S. military, China and climbing ropes in gym class, and he likened Mr. Birchum to All in the Family, Norman Lear's groundbreaking sitcom from the 1970s that featured Caroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker and focused on themes like racism, homosexuality and women's equality.
"My goal with Birchum is not for you to like him, but to agree with him. There's lots of good agitation," Carolla said.
Kelly, who hosts The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM and is a former host of shows on NBC News and the Fox News Channel, told Newsweek she was a bit nervous to become a voice actor for a comedy show, until The Daily Wire told her that if she wasn't any good, they'd simply replace her.
"It's one of those shows that say all the things you're not allowed to say. And those shows nowadays are basically a list of one. This one," she told Newsweek.
"There's a thirst by the normal left—not the woke left; forget about them—for humor that pulls us together by mocking ourselves," she said. "We were doing this in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, then we lost our ever-loving minds. There's a course correction, and this show is part of that."
Given how non-woke the show is, Mr. Birchum also has a South Park vibe to it, though without the raunch, which Carolla said is purposeful given his target audience is conservatives who frequent The Daily Wire.
"It's not the kind of show that works on many platforms, because of politics. Daily Wire was a good fit. Otherwise, it might not have found a home," Carolla said, noting that he originally pitched it to Fox 11 years ago but the entertainment network passed.
"I used Birchum to get into showbiz, then I moved on. But I always had people tell me it was my best bit," he said, adding that, despite the politically incorrect content of the show, he doesn't anticipate too much backlash.
"I don't expect it will be embraced by the mainstream," he told Newsweek. "But once you say, 'This is who I am and this is what I do,' people will initially attack you, but eventually they leave you alone — if you don't apologize."