Sam Hyde

Samuel Whitcomb "Sam" Hyde (born: April 16, 1985 (1985-04-16) [age 40]) is an American sketch comedian, writer, performance artist, and one-time author. He is best known for being a founding member of American sketch comedy group Million Dollar Extreme. Hyde was the subject of the 2022 IDubbbzTV documentary video Getting Away With It, which Hyde has credited with reviving popular interest in both himself and Million Dollar Extreme.

Hyde briefly held a presence on YouTube in the early 2010s, producing videos in a unique (for the time) transgressive and post-ironic comedic style. In 2014, Hyde began producing the web series Kickstarter TV, a series exceptionally similar to iDubbbzTV’s Kickstarter Crap, in which Hyde would comedically mock bad crowdfunding projects he found on the website Kickstarter. Much of the information about Hyde’s original YouTube channels and content has been lost, as nearly all of his channels have been terminated as of 2022 following various controversies.

Sam Hyde has recently burst back onto the web scene since 2020 with a number of projects, including the Perfect Guy Life podcast on mde.tv with Nick Rochefort, a collab with HappyPunch promo boxing in his match against IAmThmpsn, his training of Harley Morenstein from EpicMealTime for his Creator Clash bout with Arin from Game Grumps, the launch of an NFT trading card game called Mondo Megabits, the launch of his 24/7 livestream game show Fishtank.live, and most recently, the announced development of World Peace 2 with members of the original cast and crew of the cancelled Adult Swim show Million Dollar Extreme.

About

Early Life

Sam Hyde was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, United States on April 16, 1985. He graduated from Wilton High School, a public high school in Wilton, Connecticut, United States, some time in the early 2000s, before enrolling in Carnegie Mellon University, a private research university widely considered to be one of the best universities in the United States. Hyde transferred out of Carnegie Mellon in 2004, after which he enrolled at Rhode Island School of Design, a private art and design school in Rhode Island, United States, whose alumni include Seth MacFarlane, creator of the television series Family Guy and American Dad!, and American film director Gus Van Sant. Hyde graduated in 2007 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film, Animation, and Video.^{[citation needed]}

Million Dollar Extreme

In 2009, Hyde founded the sketch comedy group Million Dollar Extreme (MDE) with friends Nick Rochefort and Charls Carroll. The group began uploading short skits and videos to their original YouTube channel in the early 2010s. These early videos featured the same dark and post-ironic transgressive humor that the group would later come to be known for.

In 2013, with the help of MDE, Hyde managed to infiltrate an academic seminar event being hosted at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Hyde delivered a presentation entitled “2070 Paradigm Shift,” which was composed of rambling nonsense punctuated with offensive jokes. While the original video has long since been removed from YouTube, it can still be viewed through countless reuploads on the site.

Million Dollar Extreme: World Peace

On May 7, 2015, Adult Swim, the nighttime programming block of daytime cable network Cartoon Network, ordered a pilot episode for an untitled comedy sketch show that was to be produced by Million Dollar Extreme. Adult Swim is known for broadcasting syndicated comedy series such as American Dad!, Bob’s Burgers, and Futurama, in addition to several original series including Rick and Morty, Joe Pera Talks With You, and The Eric Andre Show. The pilot episode was deemed a success, so, on March 3, 2016, Adult Swim ordered a full six-episode first season. The show was eventually titled Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, and featured content similar to the skits posted on the group’s YouTube channel stretched to fit Adult Swim’s requested 11-minute episode format. The series, of course, had a much larger budget than the original YouTube skits, being produced by Rent Now Productions, Inc. in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The series premiered on August 5, 2016 and ran until September 16, 2016.

Hyde later claimed that the Adult Swim marketing department produced extremely “edgy” advertisement taglines for the series, allegedly including the line “World Peace is racist, hateful, and takes no prisoners.” Hyde, possibly fearing backlash, rejected these advertising pitches, resulting in the series having almost no advertising presence to speak of.

The series was widely criticized within Adult Swim’s offices and by other Adult Swim creators. Incidents included an alleged occurrence in which a production assistant attempted to break into an editing bay and delete footage from the show and an altercation between the group and an Adult Swim executive at a company party, who allegedly promised to have the group’s contract terminated.

Getting Away With It and Resurgence

In March 2021, YouTuber IDubbbzTV traveled to Cranston, Rhode Island, United States to meet with Sam Hyde and members of his current production team in order to film a documentary for his YouTube channel.^[1] Unbeknownst to Ian, Hyde had planned an elaborate ruse to present a purposefully strange and somewhat disturbing image. This included renting out a recently converted dentist’s office at 385 Columbia Avenue and turning it into a purposefully cramped and disorganized production space, getting his friends to pose as a fake production team, and paying a friend from the Rhode Island School of Design to shave her head and pretend to be Hyde’s drug-addicted, emotionally abused girlfriend. Ian spent five days in Rhode Island with Hyde and his “crew.” The documentary, which had originally been slated for release in mid-2021, did not come out until February 2022. According to Hyde, Ian was disappointed enough with the experience that he left the footage untouched for several months instead of working on outing the video together right away.

HydeWars

Hyde currently maintains a much smaller YouTube channel than his previous effort known as “HydeWars.” The channel itself is low traffic, uploads are inconsistent on the HydeWars channel, which is mainly used to promote his new large scale projects. The vast majority of Hyde’s content has been taken off of YouTube and is now only officially available through a $4.99/month subscription video-on-demand service hosted on mde.tv, Sam’s personal website. Many of his current YouTube videos feature a graphic intermission bumper interspersed throughout the video requesting that the viewer visit mde.tv and subscribe for access to Hyde’s full catalog.

Sam & Nick's Perfect Clips

In an effort to curb the amount of people uploading free clips from his Perfect Guy Life podcast with co-star Nick Rochefort, Sam Hyde proposed an idea in Mid 2022; the clip channel who did the best work for the best deal would become the one and only official Sam Hyde/ PGL Podcast clip channel, and would work on Sam Hyde's payroll. The channel "lil sh*tpost" ended up making the best deal, and started working with Sam on July 27, 2022, it has since been rebranded as Sam & Nick's Perfect Clips. ^[2]

MondoMegabits

On July 14, 2022, Sam Hyde announced on his HydeWars channel that he was working on his own NFT trading card game called MondoMegabits. A number of people online described this move as a troll or a grift, but a large number of netizens actually showed more support and interest in the project. These digital trading cards were a collaborative effort with a number of Digital VFX Artists, Sound Engineers, and Programmers. Some of the cards were revealed in the video, and all the promo material, as well as the cards themselves, were designed with a unique sort of psychedelic, 90's futurist, dystopian grunge CGI style, and some lore of the fictional world of MondoMegabits, as well as the in-game creator of the cards, Dr. Winkum Dancoobias, was given in a crude, humorous monologue narrated by online VA and "Chocolate Rain" phenom Tay Zonday.^[3] A discord community was launched for people to discuss the game, how it could work, host tournaments, buy cards, etc. The cards officially minted on September 5, 2022, with the "Fake Tech" series being the first to hit the website. On March 17, 2023, the official MondoMegabits digital game for the cards released in Alpha stage for free on itch.io for all MondoMegabits NFT Card owners.

Fishtank.Live and World Peace 2, the Future of MDE

Fishtank.Live

Fishtank.Live is a reality web series/game show created by Sam Hyde and Jet Neptune where eight contestants live in a fully monitored smart house for six weeks. Viewers can watch the live camera feed on the currently offline fishtank.live and pay tokens to interact with the contestants in a variety of ways, from sending TTS messages to removing beds from their rooms for the night. The program has been compared to the Big Brother television franchise due to its format, while others have compared it to the Stanford prison experiment after its content. The show has featured a number of YouTuber guests (in the role of "Freeloaders"), such as Chris LaFon (better known as Airsoftfatty), previously featured in an iDubbbz video; right-wing political commentator and comedian Alex Stein; Greg LeCates (better known as Skitzy_VA), who initially played MrBeast on his first night; and Frank Hassle, best known for an altercation with fellow YouTuber Steven Williams (better known as Boogie2988), where a revolver was fired by the latter.

Season 1 began on April 18, 2023, with eight contestants. Filming took place in Swansea, Massachusetts, where the house was swatted on the season's fifth day. Season 2 started on December 18, 2023, with 10 contestants. Filming took place in Cumberland, Rhode Island. On January 26, 2024, two days before the season's finale, a homestay service known as FishBNB was announced. Season 3 began on October 27, 2024, with 12 contestants. Filming took place in Wrentham, Massachusetts.

World Peace 2

Hyde announced a sequel to World Peace named World Peace 2, starring all three original MDE members (Sam Hyde, Nick Rochefort, and Charls Carroll), featuring long time MDE collaborator Erick Hayden. The shooting has been finalized, and a release date was previously slated for Spring 2024 but as of December 2024, there has been no word on World Peace 2's release.

Controversies

Racism

The Million Dollar Extreme: World Peace show was openly racist and had extreme slurs and those behaviors became common. With Brett Gelman, an Adult Swim creator now famous for portraying Murray Bauman in Stranger Things, referring to the show as an “instrument of hate” in an interview. Hyde publicly denied these allegations in a response video uploaded to his YouTube channel. Both Million Dollar Extreme and Hyde himself had developed a cult following amongst far-right extremists and were allegedly connected to several far-right groups. On December, 5 2016, only 4 months after the series had aired, Adult Swim announced that the show would not be renewed for a second season.^[4] Hyde would later claim that Adult Swim had expressed interest in producing a second season, only for Turner Broadcasting System, Adult Swim’s parent network, to make the decision to cancel the series.

Following the series’s cancellation, a number of Adult Swim alumni and musicians whose work was featured in the show expressed their disgust towards Hyde and Million Dollar Extreme for their far-right political beliefs. Hyde stated in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that he was “probably as racist or as biased as the average regular white guy or the average regular Black guy,” when asked about his alleged bias towards minorities. Hyde later started making theories, mainly that the show was cancelled after he expressed support for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and becuase Tim Heidecker had different political views.^[5] All six of the show’s episodes were on Adult Swim’s website, until being removed on June 12, 2020.

On December 23, 2016, The Washington Post reached out to Hyde about the show's cancellation, Hyde randomly replied saying that most of his YouTube ad revenue was from the KKK.^[6]

Neo-Nazi Donations

In 2017, Hyde donated $5,000 to the legal defense fund of Andrew Anglin, founder, editor, and webmaster of the neo-Nazi news site/forum The Daily Stormer. Anglin had been attempting to raise funds for his legal defense in a case brought on by the Southern Poverty Law Center, after Anglin allegedly led an online harassment campaign against a Jewish woman from Montana, United States.^[7] When asked about the donation in an interview, Hyde responded by first asking the reporter if he was Jewish and then claiming that $5,000 was not a substantial amount of money to him, before he jokingly threatened to kill Matt Pearce, the reporter conducting the interview.

On May 4, 2018, the Million Dollar Extreme YouTube Channel was terminated for repeated violations of YouTube's Community Guidelines. On September 18, 2018, the group’s subreddit was officially terminated for also violating Reddit’s Guidelines.^[8]

Grooming and abuse allegations

On November 10, 2022, Soph released the video "on sam hyde and marky", gaining over 148k views in the next 4 months.^[9] In the video, Soph questions Sam Hyde about his alleged relationship with a teenage girl named Marky when he was in his late 20s.

Pictures displayed in the video show Hyde and the girl together, and one of these pictures shows the two in a state of undress, with her face covered in blood. According to Soph, Sam Hyde's appearance in these pictures matches up with early to mid 2014, when Hyde would have been 28 or 29 and Marky would have been 16 or 17.

When asked about Marky, Hyde responded that "She is known to get nosebleeds", and that the bloody nose wasn't from him. When questioned further as to Marky's age and whether or not they had sex, Hyde responded "Ok well I'm not getting into this because you're a minor and I don't know you that well. I would just say all that shit about her being 15 and me punching her in the face is fake". Soph criticized Hyde for this response, saying "He was shifty and unwilling to answer my questions".

Boxing career

Professional career

Sam Hyde vs. IAmThmpsn

Signing onto Happy Punch Promotions, Hyde was announced to make his boxing debut on KSI's "2 Fighters, 1 Night" undercard against Australian TikTok violinist, James "IAmThmpsn" Thompson.^[10] Throughout the fight week press conferences, Hyde dawned an Irish persona dubbed "The Candyman", in which Hyde would talk in a thick Irish accent, wear bizarre Irish-related clothing, reading candy-centric poems written to intimidate Thompson, and entertain audiences and the media to generate hype for the match. On August 27, 2022, Hyde defeated Thompson in the third round by TKO. After the fight, Hyde called out left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker by threatening to murder him at his house, while remaining in-character as the Candyman, saying "I am going to stalk him and become obsessed with him, and wear his makeup, and his dresses, and use his skin as a coat like the ancient Irish did."^[11]

Gallery

References