Los Angeles, CA — Performer and comedian Kate Kennedy recently announced the launch of “The Kennedy Assassination,” a podcast wherein in Kennedy interviews men who really dislike her.
Kennedy sums up the offbeat project thusly: “Has a random man ever left a mean comment about you on the internet? I talk to those men so you don’t have to. Please just fucking shoot me.”
The show’s origins lie in its creator’s personal curiosity and obsessive comment reading.
“From the very beginning of my porn career, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: When I would go through the comments section on my videos, I would find the weirdest replies. Some of them were mean, some were funny, many were totally nonsense,” Kennedy shared. “I was fascinated. Who were these people who stopped jacking off to comment on the shape of my skull, my slightly lazy eyelid, or announce that they disagreed with my politics, under a clip of me getting railed in the ass?
As Kennedy eventually began to branch into the world of standup comedy and podcasts, the comments only got stranger. Case in point: “She’s like Ted Bundy with great tits.”
“I would read through the comments section with tears in my eyes… not because I was hurt but because they were consistently so strange while being absolutely hilarious,” she shared. “I started screenshotting the really insane ones because I knew I wanted to do something with them, I just wasn’t sure what.”
After a year of guesting consistently on other people’s podcasts, Kennedy started getting asked when she would create one of her own.
”I wanted to come up with a format that would let me combine porn and comedy in a way that was flexible, original, and didn’t lean too hard on one or the other,” Kennedy revealed. “Then, by lucky chance, in the last six months I fell in with a lot of the people associated with the roast comedy scene in LA — people who do a lot of insult and absurdist humor — and watching them work was a light bulb moment for me. I love teasing people, I love coming up with a clever comeback . . . and I had a built in talent pool of people who were already antagonistic towards me. I planned to interview these anonymous men on the hunch that their criticism of me would be unique, nonsensical, and ultimately hilarious. Bingo.”
Kennedy, however, had one last hurdle to overcome: “I started to pitch the concept for ‘The Kennedy Assassination’ around casually, and I got one response: great name, don’t do it.
“People warned me that I wouldn’t be able to convince anyone who hated me to guest on it. They warned me it would be bad for my self esteem. Everyone basically said it wouldn’t work, but I’m so goddamn stubborn that one day I put an open ad on Twitter: ‘If you are man from the internet, and you dislike me, and you would be willing to talk about why with me on a podcast, please DM me,’” she shared.
Within a day, her inbox was flooded.
“It turns out LOTS of men wanted to tell me exactly what they hated about me and were more than willing to do so publicly. This was going to work…” she shared. “By the end of the first weekend, I had four episodes recorded. A week later, I had seven, and another three scheduled. It continued to snowball from there. Start to finish, I launched ‘The Kennedy Assassination’ in less than two weeks.”
Kennedy has been buoyed by the fan and peer reactions to the podcast’s first two episodes.
“Getting to see yourself through the eyes of someone who knows almost nothing about you is so interesting, and says as much, maybe more, about them than you,” Kennedy concluded.
New episodes of “The Kennedy Assassination” post every Friday, and can be listened to on Spotify — https://open.spotify.com/show/025vkhB8vjsHBVPZpNYHep?si=sp7-Nox1S0SAK8zI8JLmww, at anchor.fm/TheKennedyAssassination — or on Kennedy’s personal website, SemiProCockJockey.com.
Keep up with Kate Kennedy on Twitter at @TheOGKennedy and also at @ThePGKennedy.
