LOS ANGELES — Adult film star and standup comic Kate Kennedy has announced the launch of her own podcast, “The Kennedy Assassination,” in which she interviews men who really dislike her.
Kennedy sums up the offbeat project thusly: “Has a random man ever left a mean comment about you on the internet? I talk to those men so you don't have to."
“Please just fucking shoot me,” the sardonic starlet added.
'Absolutely Insufferable'
The show’s origins lie in its creator’s personal curiosity and obsessive comment reading. “From the very beginning of my porn career,” Kennedy observed, “I noticed an interesting phenomenon: when I would go through the comments section on my videos, I would find the weirdest replies."
Some of them, she said, were mean, some were funny, many were totally nonsense.
Kennedy, though, was fascinated.
"Who were these people who stopped jacking off to comment on the shape of my skull, my slightly lazy eyelid, or announce that they disagreed with my politics, under a clip of me getting railed in the ass?"
“As I started to branch off into the world of standup comedy and podcasts, the comments only got stranger. ‘She’s like Ted Bundy with great tits,’ wrote a YouTube viewer. ‘Absolutely insufferable,’ replied another."
Kennedy says she would read through the comments section with tears in her eyes, "not because I was hurt but because they were consistently so strange while being absolutely hilarious. I started screenshooting the really insane ones because I knew I wanted to do something with them, I just wasn’t sure what.”
After a year of guesting consistently on other people’s podcasts, Kennedy started getting asked when she would produce one of her own.
Meet the Haters
Kennedy says she wanted to come up with a format that would let her combine porn and comedy in a way that was flexible, original, and didn’t lean too hard on one or the other.
“Then, by lucky chance, in the last six months I fell in with a lot of the people associated with the roast comedy scene in L.A. — people who do a lot of insult and absurdist humor — and watching them work was a light bulb moment for me. I love teasing people, I love coming up with a clever comeback, and I had a built-in talent pool of people who were already antagonistic towards me. I planned to interview these anonymous men on the hunch that their criticism of me would be unique, nonsensical and ultimately hilarious. Bingo.”
Yet Kennedy found one last hurdle to overcome: “I started to pitch the concept for ‘The Kennedy Assassination’ around casually, and I got one response: 'Great name, don’t do it.'"
“People warned me that I wouldn’t be able to convince anyone who hated me to guest on it. They warned me it would be bad for my self-esteem. Everyone basically said it wouldn’t work, but I’m so goddamn stubborn that one day I put an open ad on Twitter: ‘If you are man from the internet, and you dislike me, and you would be willing to talk about why with me on a podcast, please DM me.'"
Within a day, her inbox was flooded.
“It turns out lots of men wanted to tell me exactly what they hated about me and were more than willing to do so publicly. This was going to work.”
A Mirror to Trolls
By the end of the first weekend, Kennedy had four episodes recorded. "A week later," she added, "I had seven, and another three scheduled. It continued to snowball from there.”
Kennedy has been buoyed by the fan and peer reactions to the podcast’s first two episodes.
“It’s always scary to put work out there for the world, especially when you’ve already been warned off doing it. But the first episode came out and the response was so positive — people liked it, but they also got it. So much of the criticism we receive is ultimately nonsense, it’s silly and it’s dumb to take it so seriously from an anonymous source. I wanted to highlight that, and also challenge the way we think about and talk about criticism, especially towards women.”
“Getting to see yourself through the eyes of someone who knows almost nothing about you is so interesting, and says as much, maybe more, about them than you,” Kennedy concluded.
New episodes of “The Kennedy Assassination” post every Friday, and can be found on Spotify or on Kennedy’s personal website.
For more from Kate Kennedy, follow her NSFW and SFW Twitter handles.
