LOS ANGELES—Kate Kennedy is a woman with a strong sense of self, which is a good thing, because a lot of men she's never met hate her guts. To celebrate and elevate this fact and those voices, Kennedy has launched The Kennedy Assassination, the podcast where she interviews internet trolls with strong opinions about her.
Kennedy said, “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.”
“From the very beginning of my porn career, 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 were mean, some were funny, many were totally nonsense. I 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. I would read through the comments section with tears in my eyes; not because I was hurt but because they were consistently so strange while being absolutely hilarious. I started screenshotting 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 on other people’s podcasts, Kennedy started getting asked when she would create one of her own.
”I wanted to come up with a format that would let me combine porn and comedy in a way that was flexible, original, and didn’t lean too hard on one or the other,” Kennedy said.
“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 LA. 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.
“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 a 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. The first episode went on for an hour and a half of just insane circular logic and misused SAT words. I felt like I wasn’t just shooting fish in a barrel, I was shooting the barrel and the fish were flopping around everywhere on their own.
“By the end of the first weekend, I had four episodes recorded. A week later, I had seven, and another three scheduled. It continued to snowball from there. Start to finish, I launched The Kennedy Assassination in less than two weeks.”
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 listened to on Spotify or on Kennedy’s personal website, SemiProCockJockey.com.
Also, check out Kennedy’s recent appearance on the Wholesome Addiction podcast, where she walks the hosts through what she’s got going on a daily basis, and discusses her early porn career, other job skills, BDSM, college being a racket, The Kennedy Assassination podcast, and more.
Listen to ”Podcast 392: Guest Kate Kennedy” here.
Follow Kate Kennedy on Twitter @TheOGKennedy as well as on OnlyFans.
For jokes, porn punditry and PG-rated content, check out @ThePGKennedy.
