23-05-2025
Racial slurs, alien sex: The shocking return of politically incorrect comedy
Bad Thoughts is a new Netflix comedy offering, of the particular kind described as 'adult' but which is actually very childish, or at least adolescent-ish. It has a simple premise over its six bite-size episodes, each of which is an easily gulped down 15 minutes.
In every instalment of Bad Thoughts, star Tom Segura takes a universal theme – love, family, communication – and serves up sketches to illustrate just about the crudest and most unpleasant aspects of that subject that he, or indeed you, could imagine; a cancer patient's last wish is to be vigorously 'banged' by a man her husband despises; a virtual reality video game where children play aliens raping humans; a gym where every man but our hero possesses an enormous penis.
Segura is an American stand-up comedian, podcast host and Joe Rogan regular with a large and dedicated following. He has made his name saying naughty things and using naughty words in the process. It's all in the best tradition of what our own, somewhat more genteel, humorists Flanders and Swann described many years ago as the 'pee po willy bum drawers' school of humour.
Segura is one of those men whose sense of the witty is forever trapped somewhere between his 13th and 14th birthday, when the darkness of the world is still fresh and new and exciting, and funny. Bad Thoughts is crawling with bestiality, abuse, racism, castration, involuntary bowel movements, age, terminal illness and death. Segura is also one of those curious straight men who never stops talking about the ins and outs of gay sex. (Seriously – there is more man-love in Bad Thoughts than in the entire runs of Heartstopper or Queer as Folk.)
And there's nothing inherently wrong with any of that overgrown bike shed smut; it's a rich vein that has its place in the scheme of comedic things. As they enter their teens, children pick up on adults' discomfort around certain things, and it's that discomfort which is funny, not the things themselves. Exactly how funny you find it varies to taste.
Segura's maleness and largeness are very unusual on modern TV, and they make you realise how much a person's physicality characterises how you react to them. Bad taste is often made tasteful, or at least acceptable, by camp and physical slightness – eg Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen and John Waters. Segura is a very manly man, so there's no raised ironic eyebrow here.
My own revulsion reflex kicked in a couple of times across the course of Bad Thoughts. Episode four contains two of the most disgusting things I have ever seen on a screen (all shot gorgeously in pin-sharp black-and-white), but as they involve joke-destroying spoilers I shan't detail them here. Let's just say I certainly felt my head turning involuntarily away from the TV when they occurred.
You get three or four sketches in each episode, always starring Segura, either as a fictionalised version of himself or as a character. Segura appears as himself on a plain white set between them, talking to camera to guide you along.
The sketches themselves often have the form of shaggy dog stories; they feel like story-telling jokes of the old school, and good ones, but acted out. This means that their pay-off punchlines are often the funniest lines, which is rare in TV sketch comedy. Paying off a sketch is something that has defeated many grand masters of the TV sketch form, who were forced to disrupt the accepted framework to get around it. Monty Python's Flying Circus avoided punchlines entirely; The Fast Show dispensed with everything except the punch line.
In a strange way, despite its maximum gross-out quality and unsettling vibe, Bad Thoughts thus feels quite traditional. The straightforwardness and directness of its format put me in mind of the longer items in ancient, unpretentious sketch shows like Naked Video or, though Bad Thoughts has no directly topical element, Not The Nine O'Clock News.
There is nothing strikingly new or innovative in the material, but that's OK, there doesn't have to be. Is it funny though? Yes, and often very. There are several moments where I thought 'well this one isn't going anywhere' and then found I'd been diverted in completely the wrong direction. So when the big laugh came, it came with the delicious frisson of the well-turned twist.
But this isn't consistent. Bad Thoughts is patchy, and you sometimes find yourself wishing it was a bit cleverer. A protracted scenario about a failing country singer who kidnaps hundreds of his fans and imprisons them in a camp that's a cross between Squid Game and Pasolini's Salò is just too slight, and – perversely – too emotionally real to carry its epic length.
A Steven Seagal spoof just isn't good enough, and seems like it dropped in from 2005, and indeed from another kind of show entirely. Segura is an assured performer and actor, but the actual actors who appear with him are often better. Robert Iler – the hapless AJ of The Sopranos, now all grown up – features in three interconnected sketches, and his vulnerability makes him a far more likeable and relatable 'hero' than Segura, who looks like he could kill an ox with one punch. You really feel for Robert Iler's character, which makes it funnier.
It's interesting that Netflix is now the only broadcaster who will still go this near the knuckle. The BBC, not so very long ago, produced Julia Davis's Nighty Night – with its extremely uncomfortable jokes about disability and cancer, and a character who shoved cat food where it was never meant to go. Davies now does her deliciously icky thing on the Dear Joan And Jericha podcast, and the BBC's new comedy line-up, featuring Michael Palin and Rob Brydon, looks positively trad. (Which in itself is a relief, given their recent propensity for throwing wads of cash at talentless drag acts.)
There's a sketch in Bad Thoughts – one of the funniest – about a school play which goes horribly wrong, with primary age kids re-enacting the horrors of American troops in the Vietnam war, complete with casual racism, to the excruciating embarrassment of their parents. It's no more unpalatable than the average sketch in Little Britain, but it's unthinkable that the BBC of today would even contemplate okaying it.
Netflix is also the home of lots of cancelled or semi-cancelled comedians that nobody else will touch; Tony Hinchcliffe, Dave Chappelle, Shane Gillis, Matt Rife, Ricky Gervais and Louis CK. The standard across these names is wildly variable, but it seems regrettable that they have been corralled into one corner.
There is good taste bad taste, and bad taste bad taste. Bad Thoughts is very much the latter. I tend to the Victoria Wood theory that dark humour is easy, and that it is much, much harder to create fun and uplifting comedy, or at least fun and uplifting comedy that is any good. As George Orwell said of Salvador Dalí, '… suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow … There is always one escape: into wickedness. Always do the thing that will shock and wound people… Along those lines you can always feel yourself original.'
But. Bad Thoughts arrives at a very particular cultural moment, as what we have known – and either loved or hated – as ' woke ' seems to be dying out, or at least retreating a little. So different considerations apply. Segura is a hate figure for the so-called woke American left, who accuse him of all the usual tedious thought and speech crimes.
"The best thing to do as an artist is to acknowledge the dark thoughts." @tomsegura & I discussed the art and science of humor and why the "dark topic comics" are such good people offstage and the onstage "ultra wholesome" comedians often are just the opposite offstage.
— Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. (@hubermanlab) May 20, 2025
The speed of woke's dissolution has been quite startling. Between the production and release of Bad Thoughts, things have shifted so much that there are several sketches that already seem dated. The two or three scenarios that focus on disputes over unsayable words and identity groups are by far the show's weakest moments – but just a year or so ago they would've been among its highlights.
It feels like it's time to move on. We have all wasted so much time with the rubbish of the last decade and the posing ninnies who pushed it. Woke is (possibly was) nihilistic nastiness disguised, very badly, as 'kindness' and 'inclusivity'. We all know that now, and it's no longer quite so hard to point it out. This war may be over, at least in that form. Rather like post-war Hollywood, we need some affable fun again now. Yes, there is a certain release and relief about this possible return to cultural sanity, but that palls quickly. We deserve to forget. We can start, hopefully, to depict the world honestly again, not trying either to correct it, or correct the correction.
What this means for purveyors of bad taste like Tom Segura is that they need to find new unsayables and fresh unpalatables. And there will, inevitably, always be new ones.
