Comedian Whitney Cummings didn’t hold back during her New Year’s Eve roast of the year 2024 on CNN, offering some wild takes that left host Anderson Cooper looking blank at times.
She swung at the media, the COVID-19 vaccine, women’s sports and Democrats, among other subjects.
Cooper and co-host Andy Cohen laughed and nodded along for parts of the routine, which started out with jokes about the nation’s fixation on killers like the Menendez brothers and Gypsy Rose Blanchard.
About a minute and a half in, she joked that in 2024, “things got so bleak, we started watching the WNBA.”
She went on to reference “America’s Sweethearts,” a documentary about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, which the comedian said “showed the girls being treated horribly, underpaid, crying.”
“I thought I’d opened a video on Hunter Biden’s laptop,” she added.
After joking about crypto being akin to “astrology for men,” which got laughs from the hosts, Cummings delved into the November election, slinging mud at President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“The Democrats couldn’t hold a primary because they were too busy holding a body upright,” she said.
“Are we still rolling? Am I off?” she asked.
“Go for it!” Cohen replied, laughing. Cooper didn’t appear to react.
“It was amazing that the pro-choice party didn’t give their voters one when it came to the presidential candidate,” Cummings continued. “Kamala was forced on us so hard, you’d think she was patented by Pfizer. Or Moderna.”
To wrap up, she took a shot at the press, saying, “since I only have a minute left live on establishment media, why don’t we just say a bunch of things that we know that they’ll never cover.”
She rapid-fire rallied off some final lines, which she later summarized in part on X (formerly Twitter), saying she rushed through them because she was “scared” and running out of time on air.
“The first trump shooter didn’t have any silverware in his house,The Crown prince of Saudi Arabia put money into Disney, why is fluoride still in our water? Monsanto paid Google to skew search results, why are so many presidents chefs dead?” she posted on X.
After the roast, as Cummings bantered with Cohen about her performance, she joked that Cooper — who had not yet said anything — was “melting down.”
“I only understood like half the references,” Cooper said. “I’m not a pop culture [person.]”
Her roast drew a very mixed reaction on social media, with many right-wing pages praising it as hilarious and epic, and others characterizing it as “weird and unfunny,” “telling” and a desperate attempt to be “edgy.”
CNN did not include it in its highlight reel of its New Year’s Eve coverage.
Cummings, also an actor, producer and podcaster, previously served as the showrunner of the short-lived 2018 “Roseanne” reboot, which starred the famously conspiratorial Donald Trump supporter Roseanne Barr.
At the time, Cummings described herself as “sort of the progressive lib-tard in the room” at the show.
In March, Cummings suggested she doesn’t agree with either political party and said that she believes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the vaccine skeptic that Trump’s since tapped to be his health secretary — “is doing something right.”
She said last year that getting “canceled” is a great thing for a comedian because of the publicity it garners.
