Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | News | October 20, 2025
There was something of an emergency podcast situation this morning on David Spade and Dana Carvey’s Fly on the Wall podcast. Honestly, I don’t listen often unless there’s a particularly good guest, but I tuned in today because Spade and Carvey added a segment ahead of the regular show to address a “controversy” that had popped up mostly on Reddit (not even Bluesky is making a big deal out of it, except as an excuse to make fun of Spade).
Basically, here’s what happened: Marc Benioff is the CEO of Salesforce. He used to be a major Democratic donor back when Hillary Clinton ran, has a history of supporting LGBTQ rights, and has donated heavily to homelessness initiatives. But like a lot of rich people, he got weird after the pandemic and now counts himself as a Trump supporter (same thing happened to another rich Marc, Andreessen).
Anyway, Salesforce held a corporate retreat last week. Ahead of it, Benioff made a comment requesting that Trump send National Guard troops to San Francisco. “We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” he told the New York Times.
People who are still shocked when rich men become Republicans were aghast. A Salesforce board member resigned over the comment, and two comedians - Pajiba favorites Kumail Nanjiani and Ilana Glazer - pulled out of their gigs at the retreat. Good for them!
Salesforce, however, scrambled to replace Nanjiani and Glazer and reached out to David Spade, who accepted, unaware of why they’d dropped out. That was the gist of Spade’s comments on the podcast this morning: he was a last-minute replacement, didn’t know about the controversy, and noted that Benioff has since walked back the remarks (which is true). He also didn’t appreciate folks suggesting that Nanjiani and Glazer were replaced by a B-list comic. (B-list? You wish, buddy.)
And here’s my deal: I don’t care. Do I think it’s great that Nanjiani and Glazer took a stand and backed out? Absolutely. Would I have been disappointed if they hadn’t? Probably not; it’s a corporate retreat. I doubt I’d have even known about it. Do I care that David Spade did it? Not really. And truthfully, even if he’d known about Benioff’s comments, he probably still would’ve done it, and I still wouldn’t have cared, because I don’t have enough respect for David Spade to lose any respect for David Spade.
The Riyadh situation was entirely different: those were comedians being paid by a ruthless government with a long record of slavery and human rights abuses, using comedy to whitewash those violations. This was a corporate retreat where comedians were paid to give attendees a 45-minute break from whatever corporate classes they were enduring. Marc Benioff is an idiot who said something stupid that I strongly disagree with, but he doesn’t kill journalists.
The point is: David Spade didn’t need to address this because no one cares. Also, if Reddit starts canceling comedians for every dumbass thing a comedian does, we won’t have any comedians left. This isn’t a scolding situation; it’s a relentlessly mocking situation where we make fun of Salesforce for having to stoop to hiring David Spade because their CEO said something idiotic.
