So there’s a headline you didn’t expect to read today, right? Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, YouTube poster boy and star of low-effort attempts at comedy such as ‘Getting Two Indian Guys From Fiverr to Hold Up a Sign Reading Death To All Jews,’ has responded to the whole “Nazi controversy” once again (I make that his fourth official response now) by killing Adolf Hitler.
PewDiePie came under fire earlier this month after the Wall Street Journal informed Disney, the company that owns the YouTuber’s digital media affiliates Maker Studios, of a video in which he made the aforementioned poor taste, anti-Semitic joke, leading to them dropping him from their brand. This in turn led to YouTube dropping the second season of the online show Scare PewDiePie, followed by a media storm in which major media outlets and YouTubers basically shit-talked one another from their respective corners of the internet.
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PewDiePie apologized for the video in question, though also went on to say that the outrage had been manufactured by the Wall Street Journal and that he was only an “amateur comedian,” which is not the kind of description you’d expect from a guy who has 53 million subscribers on YouTube. However, Twitter users began parroting the notion that PewDiePie wasn’t just a guy with a big platform who told a very ill-advised joke and then proceeded to stubbornly double down on it, but rather that he was actually a bit of a Nazi. This odd take on the situation has now led to PewDiePie to kill Nazi leader Hitler… albeit in video game form.
While the PewDiePie controversy revolved around the 27-year-old being so incapable of admitting he’d told a shit joke that The Daily Stormer started to believe he was a fascist and the House of Mouse had to intervene, this video is… pretty funny, actually. With him poking fun at himself and those he’s been at loggerheads with over the past month or so, the YouTuber sets about “disproving” the Nazi claims by way of killing Hitler in Sniper Elite 4, with his “PR manager Ethan” warning him that he “looks precisely like what Hitler wanted.”
Although the PewDiePie controversy happened last week which is basically the Stone Age given how fast the internet works through its scandals, it’s good to see that YouTube’s top star is putting some effort into his humor, rather than saying the most offensive thing he can think of before acting surprised when people call him out on it.
