Stand-up comedian Andrew Santino has claimed that the Walt Disney Company threatened not to air his new Hulu special, White Noise, unless he edited his jokes about “Disney adults.”
White Noise is the 41-year-old actor and comedian’s third stand-up special and his first for Hulu, which is owned and controlled by Disney.
In a new interview with Variety, Santino spoke about a section of the special in which he rants about adults who make their devotion to Disney content, merchandise and theme parks a big part of their personality.
Asked how quickly Disney had contacted him about the jokes after submitting the special, Santino responded: “Immediately.”
He continued: “They couldn’t wait to trim the fat on those jokes. Candidly, we went back and forth, and they didn’t really enjoy having that stuff in there. We found a happy medium, and I was able to keep the jokes in there, but [the jokes] were manipulated.
“I’m not going to lie: They definitely changed the jokes. I was not stoked about that. We got into a little bit of a war. They did not want those jokes in there. My argument was: I joke about a lot of other stuff in the special that’s controversial. I don’t think joking about people who like Disney as grown-ups is a controversial take, but they disagreed.”
Asked whether the joke was “harsher” before Disney intervened, Santino said: “Yeah. It was funnier. It peeled open a little bit more than what you saw, on people going to Disney without kids and adults who wear Disney clothing. But Disney is a massive corporate conglomerate, and they were like: ‘If you want it on here, this is how we want it. Otherwise we won’t be able to air the special. We have to cut the jokes.’
“So we found a medium. We said we’d find a way to manipulate the jokes in a way that works for everybody. [Disney] got kind of what they wanted, and I tried to get the best of what I wanted. This is compromise in the modern world of media.”
The Independent has contacted Disney for comment.
Disney has been known to censor content it disapproves of in the past. In 2022, Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch released what he claimed were hilarious “real notes” he received from Disney’s censorship department.
Among the notes from the network, one reads: “Please revise ‘poopface’ as it comes across as a replacement for ‘s***face’. Prior use of Mabel saying ‘Poop. Poop. And Butts’ in the episode ‘Fight Fighters’ came across as more childlike and not as offensive.”
Hirsch responded: “I’ve never met a human on earth of any age who would be offended by a cartoon saying the word ‘poop face.’ Not changing it.”
