Kinda Funny Co-Founder Colin Moriarty Leaves YouTube Group After Controversial Joke

Colin Moriarty, a co-founder of the popular YouTube channel Kinda Funny, said today that he plans to leave the group. This announcement comes several days after Moriarty drew fire for a controversial Twitter joke targeting women.



Pictured: Colin Moriarty (Screengrab from Kinda Funny video)

“It’s with a heavy heart and great sadness that I announce my resignation from Kinda Funny, effective immediately,” Moriarty wrote on Facebook today. “This morning, the guys and I had a constructive conversation, and feel that, with our separate visions for the future and for the direction of the company, it’s time to go our separate ways.”

Moriarty, who spent several years at IGN before leaving in 2014 to found Kinda Funny, is a colleague of mine who has long been supportive of Kotaku (I appeared on his show last week). He’s always been outspoken about his conservative political stances, making appearances on various political talk shows including, just this morning, the Glenn Beck radio show. To many Kinda Funny fans, Moriarty’s politics have always seemed at odds with the rest of the group, whose members skew liberal.

Last week, on International Women’s Day, Moriarty tweeted a crummy, poorly targeted joke:

And continued:

She's actually in bed next to me, and thinks my blatantly obvious joke is funny. Because not all people are humorless sacks of shit. LOL. https://t.co/ctpxLu0YT8 — Colin Moriarty (@notaxation) March 8, 2017

Unsurprisingly, these tweets proved controversial, drawing fire from a number of Kinda Funny fans and outside observers. Later that day, Kinda Funny co-founder Greg Miller issued a statement apologising and noting that Moriarty would no longer be appearing at PAX East in Boston this past weekend. And now, Moriarty has left the group.

“Opportunities are already popping up for me, bringing me in a new, different, and exciting direction, a direction that I feel makes perfect sense for me,” he wrote. “Obviously, you haven’t seen or heard the last of me.”

Although to some extent this split had been building for quite some time — Moriarty’s views often conflicted with Miller’s and the other co-founders’ — it appears that this joke was the spark that lit up the gasoline.