Even Jonah Hill Is Dunking on Kanye West (Kind Of)

I have a love/hate relationship with Jonah Hill. On the one hand, I saw a guy who looked (very much) like me who was breaking in with all Seth Rogen and all the dudes whose movies I loved. On the other hand, I looked very much like Jonah Hill when SuperBad was everywhere, and it messed with my head. I didn’t care for the comparisons because it meant that there was somebody out there already doing my thing, so how would I ever get a chance to break in? Utter nonsense, but that’s how I felt.

As I got older, both Jonah and I started to change in our appearances. We both lost weight and yet kept our giant heads, and that’s where the similarities ended. I finally felt free of any comparisons and could just move on with my life, occasionally enjoying Jonah Hill when I saw him in a movie, and no longer thinking about the things we shared. But it turns out that we’re both pretty insecure individuals (in very different ways).

I’m insecure because I couldn’t get over being compared (mostly in looks) to a huskier actor, even though he was super successful. Jonah Hill is insecure because he was dating a woman who was a surfer and gave her all kinds of grief for… sharing pictures of herself surfing. It was a bad look to say the least, and the surfer, Sarah Brady, accused Hill of emotional abuse. This is all to say that, if there’s someone who should have no standing to dunk on someone else publicly, it’s Jonah Hill. And yet, here we are.

Hill has a new movie, Outcome, in which Keanu Reeves plays a Hollywood actor who is out to find out who is blackmailing him with a salacious tape (five bucks says he’s blackmailing himself). In a recent interview, Hill acknowledged making a joke about Kanye West, who is so unpopular that he was recently denied entrance into the UK. The rapper still hasn’t recovered from being openly and rapantly anti-Semitic, something Hill simply referred to as “bizarre.”

The joke in question apparently involves Hill’s character in the film saying that being anti-Semitic doesn’t hurt your career, and then showing a picture of Kanye. So, ya know, it’s kind of a joke! Hill said he made the joke because West referenced loving Jonah Hill when attempting to say he wasn’t anti-Semitic anymore. But Hill also just seems… weirdly okay with the whole thing. “[It] just sat with me in a way that it’s, like, all good, Hill said on The Zane Lowe Show (via THR). “I love him still, and I hope whatever happens, he can heal or whatever, and everyone can heal from all that stuff. … I hope he can heal and make it right with the people he needs to make it right [with] in the Jewish community. Me and him got no beef.”

I’m not here to tell anybody what to be offended by. But Hill referring to Kanye’s hateful nonsense by saying he needs to “heal” is pretty absurd, and part of why his joke even works. He mentions that Kanye has still been able to sell out stadiums and, well, Jonah, maybe that wouldn’t happen if more people (especially high-profile ones) weren’t still like “he’s crazy, but I love him.” If you want to take a “shot” at the guy then just do it, don’t try to explain it away.