Amazon Prime Cancelled Our Anti-Trump Comedy
Tyranny is here and it's real. No surrender!
Welcome to my shameless advertisement for our comedy special, Dictator for a Day DFAD. My crew and I did our part and then some for the resistance. We produced and taped a live musical comedy special taking Trump, MAGA, and Project 2025 to the mat. We packed a small off-Broadway theater three straight nights on the eve of the 2024 election and with a top caliber cast delivered an inspired, toxic hour-and-a-half of unhinged, subversive anti-fascist sarcasm spearheaded by the talent of J-L Cauvin, the world’s most devastating Trump impressionist and backed by a dozen original twisted songs Mel Brooks, Tom Lehrer, or Spike Jones would have been proud to call his own.
Next we edited down the footage from three cameras across the three shows and sound edited enough rounds to memorize the show involuntarily. Amidst the chaos of finishing production Donald J. Trump was elected the 47th President of the United States, and the relevance of what we were doing escalated from satirical commentary to fateful prophesy. As we finalized our “screener,” we produced a Trailer, began posting clips from the show on social media, and gave a few folks a sneak peak. One of them, a celebrated veteran Broadway reviewer, Peter Filichia, had this to say:
“I've seen all the great mimics who have done marvelous impersonations... but I have never, ever, ever seen one as accomplished as J-L Cauvin. It's a performance that demands to be seen."
Next, some of our clips on social media started to go viral—200,000 views, 5K likes; 600,000 views, 10K likes. Then, as a sort of bizarre icing on the cake, various “predictions” from the monologues and songs started to become reality—insane tariffs, sinking financial markets, arrests of legal U.S. residents without charges, elimination of due process, brazen government attacks on institutions of higher learning. Dictator for a Day didn’t simply predict all of it. It predicted all of it in rhythm, rhyme, dance, and one-liners delivered uncannily by “Trump” himself. We were by all accounts poised to conquer the world of entertainment, and perhaps even help save the greater world we live in.
And then we hit the proverbial brick wall. A very well known independent film distributor who had in fact distributed our director’s previous film told him flat out she couldn’t touch this one for fear of reprisal. Distributor after distributor refused even to return a phone call, an email, or a text. We did, however, receive a license agreement from Amazon Prime through the aggregator Filmhub. The license sat there for about six weeks without our film’s ever “going live.” Then, without warning or explanation, one day in April Amazon listed Dictator for a Day as “removed.” We had been cancelled before even being launched.
It’s a strange thing when you are the direct victim of political repression. Perhaps from wishful thinking, perhaps from simple denial, part of you doesn’t really believe it’s happening. But it’s happening. It’s happened to Harvard, Columbia, Twitter/X, Alex Padilla, Gabrielle Cuccia, Terry Moran, the law firm of Paul Weiss, NPR, and the American Broadcasting Company. Compared to these targets and many others you are small potatoes but not too small to avoid being caught in a rigged algorithm or the wary gaze of an anxious corporate suit. The only real difference is it’s you, and you were supposed to live a better life when your parents birthed you into a free society so many years ago. You were supposed to grow up and thrive in a meritocracy limited only by your raw talent and refined perseverance. You were supposed to corral all your creative and financial resources to fight tyranny when ultimately it reared its ugly head. You were supposed to pay back your lifetime friends and their friends who invested in the show.
As Executive Producer I can’t say I didn’t see it coming at all. I had my first clue when the genius dramatic account of Trump’s misbegotten young life, The Apprentice, had so much trouble finding even basic distribution after receiving an eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes. But now the trouble has come to me. Yeah, it’s good trouble as John Lewis might have said, but it’s trouble nonetheless. When it comes to trouble, the only question of ultimate consequence is how you react.
We are reacting with the fight of our lives. Our sleeper anti-MAGA megahit without a home is now available for direct rental on our website DFAD. While there is still the semblance of a First Amendment please go there, rent it for a few bucks, watch it, laugh your ass off, and tell two friends. To click is to resist. To guffaw is to resist. To sing along is to resist. One day when senseless war, repression, and the shadow of autocracy have passed we’ll be back on Broadway and on Hulu, Netflix, and Paramount+ to boot. Until then, see you on the front lines.
Yes, we are living in a new age under Dump and it ain’t pretty, Rich! We are living the fiction of 1984 in 2025 under this regime, and I give you credit for trying to unmercifully parody it in October of 2024. But who would have thought he would have been reelected, especially given the widespread warnings of what he would try to do, given the elimination of guardrails this second time around! And - by golly - he’s following the autocrat’s rulebook which is Project 2025 to a T - and this is after he famously lied during his 2024 campaign that he never heard of it! For someone who’s never heard of it, he seems to be following all the steps quite religiously - or his evil advisers are doing, with just propping him up as a “useful idiot.” I could have predicted you would have run into censorship issues trying to peddle your artistic effort through a streaming option, Rich, so just take a seat behind all of the other institutions this fascistic regime has fought to silence! But our day will rise, believe me, very soon as Dump’s horrible policies become ever so untenable! Keep the faith, brother!
From the DFAD web site:
"
A multi-bankrupted, thrice-married businessman from Queens, NY—who became a TV celebrity and then improbably went on to become a twice-impeached President and self-proclaimed victim of a "stolen election"—proudly proclaimed on Dec 5, 2023 he'd only need to be a dictator on Day 1.
Yet the threat became more serious the more seriously it was taken by the media, the political system, and the American electorate. Now, Trump II—47—is a dystopian reality. As people helplessly watch democracy wither in real time, they are asking themselves, "What can I do about it?"
The counter-intuitive answer is: LAUGH!
"