Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | October 7, 2026
Less than a year ago, I thought I had no idea who Sebastian Maniscalco was. Marcello Hernandez debuted what I thought was an original character in an SNL sketch. I wasn’t impressed, but then I discovered the character was based on a real comedian, one I had apparently already seen in a terrible Max series called Bookie. I watched both seasons.
We all have blind spots. Mine, apparently, is a wildly successful middle-aged comedian who sells out arenas. He also has his own SiriusXM channel, Sebastian Maniscalco’s Comedy Radio, and that channel is at the center of a very boring but very consequential controversy.
You see, Sebastian Maniscalco’s Comedy Radio replaced a long-running channel called Raw Comedy. OK, and? Well, Raw Comedy played a lot of young, up-and-coming comics, and those comics collected royalties from SiriusXM, which turned out to be a real source of passive income. Sebastian Maniscalco’s Comedy Radio, meanwhile, plays mostly established names like Eddie Murphy and Norm Macdonald, who don’t particularly need the royalties.
You can probably see where this is going. The change went largely unnoticed for months, but then Matt Ruby wrote about it on Substack on Monday, and Reddit lost its ever-loving mind. A number of comedians — Patton Oswalt, Michelle Wolf, Matthew Broussard, Margaret Cho, and Marc Maron, among others — have since blasted the move. As of this writing, Maniscalco himself hasn’t weighed in (in his defense, he probably just licensed out his name and has little to do with which comics make the rotation). SiriusXM, for its part, says the rebrand was necessary because Raw Comedy wasn’t drawing big enough numbers.
Personally, I had no idea anyone still listened to satellite radio. Aren’t there, like, 200 channels? Can’t they just swap out the Neil Diamond channel for Raw Comedy? Or tack a new channel onto the end? Clearly, I don’t understand how satellite radio works, but it does seem a shame that the comedians who need the money are losing it to comedians who don’t. That feels very America right now.
