Whitney Cummings didn’t hold back during CNN’s New Year’s Eve celebration, taking the network, the Democratic Party, and just about everything else to task in a roast that left Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen visibly squirming. Frankly, it’s the kind of unfiltered, no-sacred-cows humor that the left used to champion—before they turned every joke into a potential hate crime. And boy, did she deliver.
Right out of the gate, Cummings took aim at CNN itself, mocking its dwindling audience with a zinger about playing 3,000-seat theaters—“about the viewership of CNN these days.” Ouch. That one probably stung more than the network’s year-end ratings report.
Watching Cooper and Cohen try to laugh it off was comedy gold in its own right. They looked like they were deciding whether to cringe or nervously chuckle, probably leaning toward the latter since Cummings was the only spark of life on their broadcast.
Cummings wasn’t content to stop there. She swung at the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris, and the cultural chaos of 2024, proving that no one and nothing was off-limits. Her jab at Harris—”Kamala was forced on us so hard, you’d think she was patented by Pfizer or Moderna”—was the kind of biting commentary you rarely hear from Hollywood, where Democratic talking points are usually treated as gospel. But Cummings dared to call out the obvious: Harris’s nomination feels less like democracy in action and more like a mandate from on high. The fact that she framed it with a Big Pharma dig was just the cherry on top.
“2024 election fried our brains,” she recalled. “The Democrats couldn’t hold a primary cause they were too busy holding a body upright. … It was amazing that the pro-choice party didn’t give their voters one when it came to the presidential candidate. Kamala was forced on us so hard, you’d think she was patented by Pfizer or Moderna.”
Then there was her roast of liberal obsessions, like society’s newfound sympathy for criminals. Comparing the Menendez brothers to misunderstood anti-heroes and skewering Gypsy Rose as a “celebrity murderer” perfectly captured the absurdity of a culture that now treats killers like they’re on a red carpet. When she joked about Gypsy Rose posing in a fancy dress and the crowd cheering “slay,” she nailed the uncomfortable truth about how deranged and disconnected from reality we’ve become.
Cummings also took aim at the broader cultural insanity of 2024, mocking everything from the WNBA’s sudden rise in viewership (“Things got so bleak, we started watching the WNBA”) to Hollywood’s half-hearted attempts at equality. Her quip about Demi Moore starring in a movie “as long as a hot 28-year-old wears a leotard” perfectly skewered the industry’s superficial nods to progressivism.
What made her roast land so hard, though, was how it held up a mirror to the left’s most glaring hypocrisies. Cummings didn’t shy away from pointing out the Democrats’ failure to hold a primary, remarking that they were too busy “holding a body upright.” Her observation that the so-called “pro-choice party” gave voters no choice when it came to their presidential candidate hit home, especially as Kamala Harris continues to struggle to connect with her own party, let alone the American people.
In an era when so many comedians play it safe, Cummings proved that comedy still has the power to speak uncomfortable truths. Whether the left is ready to laugh—or even listen—is another matter entirely. But for the rest of us, her roast was a refreshing reminder that calling out hypocrisy is still hilarious, no matter who’s in the hot seat.
