Theo Von admitted to Andrew Santino on a recent episode of This Past Weekend that he might have to re-record an upcoming comedy special after a disastrous taping in September. What went wrong? Von revealed he went off antidepressants before filming “because I wanted to have a little bit more emotional storyline” for the show, but that wasn’t the only problem. “The government put out this DHS video,” he said, “that made me really scared.”
For background, the Department of Homeland Security used a clip of Von for a social media post in September that implied the comedian was in favor of the administration’s mass deportations. Von immediately asked the government to take it down.
“Yooo DHS i didn’t approve to be used in this. I know you know my address so send a check. And please take this down and please keep me out of your ‘banger’ deportation videos,” Von tweeted in a deleted post. “When it comes to immigration my thoughts and heart are a lot more nuanced than this video allows. Bye!”
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When the online threats immediately followed, Von feared for his own safety. His dread was justified when a government official woke him up the next morning with a text offering extra security. “I’m like, what are you talking about? Extra security? I don’t even know the code to my ring camera,” Von said in early October. “You’re just going to put police cars in my neighborhood? What are my neighbors going to think now? They’re fearful. I don’t know, man, that really kind of shook me.”
That was the backdrop going into the taping, Von told Santino last week. “I just got so much hate stuff. A lot of it I didn’t see, but I would just see enough where it was like, ‘Fuck, this is scary.’ And that Charlie Kirk thing had happened a couple weeks before. And so I started just getting real paranoid.”
That paranoia extended to the filming of his special. What if there was an unhinged person in the audience who believed Von was endorsing mass deportations? “It made me really scared, to be honest with you,” he said.
Von, whose father was an immigrant from Nicaragua, supported Trump in the last election but warned DHS that he didn’t want to participate in its propaganda. The department took down the video after Von’s complaints.
Santino believes Von’s fear and anger were appropriate. “Talk about pulling that out of context. (The government is) so good at that. They just took something that had nothing to do with something else. You’re making a joke, and then they’re like, ‘He’s our spokesperson,’” Santino said.
Santino knows how he would have reacted in a similar situation: “What? I didn’t sign up for that, bro.”
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