Piker & El-Sayed: Comedy Gold

Hasan Piker & Abdul El-Sayed have become the greatest comedy duo since Abbott & Costello. 

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello thrived from 1935 to 1957 in burlesque, radio, motion pictures, and TV–from their beloved “Who’s on First?” routine to their “7 x 13 = 28” sketch. Abbott & Costello intended to be funny. They worked hard at it and became legends.

Piker and El-Sayed are comedy naturals. They effortlessly earn laughs, especially when they are unintentionally hilarious.

Their latest schtick is called “Hasan who?” While running as the Islamo-Socialist Democrat nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, El-Sayed pretends not to know Piker and forgets the über-divisive, hard-Left podcaster’s initial, affectionate, and touching words:

“Abdul El-Sayed is my guy, right? He’s a Rhodes Scholar. He’s a doctor. He’s a stud, too,” Piker swooned on “The Breakfast Club” on June 16. “He can do three plates on the bench press. And, I mean, that’s beside the point, but, you know, I like that personally.”

As for wooing voters with El-Sayed, Piker gushed, “He reached out to me. He said, ‘Oh, let’s go. Let’s do a campaign rally together.’ And I had already done stuff with him. I traveled to Dearborn. We worked out, played basketball–all this stuff.”

Piker and El-Sayed did even more stuff. Seemingly inseparable, they appeared jointly at campaign events, lifted weights together, and chuckled about men’s fashion at a pool party the day before the Aug. 4 Democrat primary.

Piker cheered at El-Sayed’s Election Night celebration.

But, ironically, El-Sayed’s victory intensified scrutiny of his relationship with Piker. Americans learned that Piker outrageously said, “America deserved 9/11,” “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” and much more.

Suddenly, El-Sayed was not that into Piker. El-Sayed told NBC’s Kristen Welker on the August 9 “Meet the Press”: “I’m less concerned now with who I’m campaigning with and a lot more concerned about who I’m campaigning to.”

Signaling that he and Piker had grown apart, El-Sayed told Semafor’s Nicholas Wu on Aug. 26 that he had “no plans” to campaign again with Piker and ridiculed their defunct partnership: “The effort to make this race about a streamer in L.A. is actually kind of laughable.”

Since then, Piker has scored big laughs as a jilted-boyfriend type who ignores El-Sayed’s ghosting, listens to the silence of his non-phone calls, and yet dreams that the two never have been closer.

“He asked me to stump for him,” Piker recalled Aug. 28, also via Semafor. “I’ve already had the guy on, like, a hundred times on the broadcast. You know, I’ve fundraised for him. I like him a lot.”

El-Sayed dissed Piker anew on Aug. 29.

“I don’t want to have a conversation about a Twitch streamer in California,” El-Sayed told journalists in Lansing, Michigan. “That’s just not a serious conversation.”

The towering Piker soon chased down the fire-plug-like El-Sayed, and threw his long, loving arms around him. Piker then rebuked critics who, he claims, have mischaracterized his and El-Sayed’s previous comments. “…at the same time they were doing it to me, and they did it to Abdul,” Piker told Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti on their Sept. 1 “Breaking Points” podcast.

Piker also applauded El-Sayed’s apologies for some of his earlier, provocative remarks: “I hope that people see that as humility and grace and understand that he’s not this like scary Islamist, jihadist guy that he’s being presented as.”

Audiences are roaring, from Denver to Detroit and from Manhattan Island to Mackinac Island. (As it happens, El-Sayed slammed the northern-Michigan vacation spot in a hot-mic knee-slapper: “I hate Mackinac SO much,” he said in 2020. “Every time I’ve ever come here, I’ve hated it. Why am I here?”) 

Piker & El-Sayed are expected to dominate the airwaves through Tuesday, Nov. 3. After that, they either will be picked up for six years or canceled and soon forgotten.

Now that’s comedy.  

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