Comedians David Spade and Dana Carvey used a recent episode of their podcast, “Fly on the Wall,” to criticize how Hollywood and award shows emphasize race and gender when recognizing winners.
Spade said he recently saw a clip announcing a director’s win that noted he was the “first Black director to win for this documentary,” and argued the industry should drop that framing.
“I wish they would quit saying that because I think everyone we can’t all be equal to you,” Spade said. “‘Oh, the first in 30 years to have a Black actor win this.’ If you just say we’re all actors . . . now this is my point of view, that it just makes it more even and not, we’re all just the same. We’re all acting.”
Carvey added his own example, joking that when he won his Emmy Award, the announcement noted he was the “198th straight white male that has won this award.”
Spade also recalled his time on the NBC sitcom “Just Shoot Me,” which ran from 1997 to 2003, saying producers would routinely tell him in advance whenever a woman was directing an episode.
“I [would] go, ‘That’s fine. Just is it a director? Yeah. Okay, we got it.’ Like you don’t even have to say that,” Spade said. “Female director. It feels like a little, not condescending, but a little diminishing. That’s a good word. It’s a little 5%. Instead of going, ‘We don’t have a regular director,’ you know what I mean? So, I was a big proponent of fighting that.”
Carvey agreed, calling “female director” “a funny thing to say.”
Earlier Comments on California Leadership
The remarks follow earlier episodes in which Spade criticized the state of California’s entertainment industry under Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. In a March episode, Spade said “the Hollywood industry is dying” and that he was “just trying to put the blame somewhere,” pointing to the bankruptcy filing tied to the CBS Radford lot, where he filmed “Just Shoot Me” near the set of “Seinfeld.”
“Of course, just filed for bankruptcy, the lot. Terrifying in LA. Thanks, [LA Mayor] Karen Bass. Thanks, [Gov.] Gavin [Newsom],” Spade said at the time.
Mayor Bass’s press office responded to those comments in a statement to Fox News Digital, saying, “Mayor Bass has championed the entertainment industry because it’s a bedrock of our middle class.” The statement noted that this year she “slashed filming fees at Griffith Observatory and reopened the LA Central Library to film production for the first time in over a decade,” and that under her leadership “more than 3 million square feet of studio and creative office space have been approved, and over 120 sound stages are now under construction across Los Angeles.”
In an April episode featuring comedian Tim Dillon as a guest, Spade said he “got in trouble” for his earlier remarks and clarified, “I wasn’t really mad at Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass.”
“I was just saying, ‘Could we make it a slightly more of a priority? I don’t know what we’re spending the money on that’s flowing in, because it’s a lot flowing in, but it goes out so quickly. I want to sort of reserve a little piece of the pie to like focus, like let’s try to get this back,'” Spade said. “That’s all.”
Dillon, however, argued that Bass and Newsom “seem to think everything’s kind of going well,” adding that “when someone thinks things are going well, it’s very hard to make them understand” that people are leaving the state.
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