Martin Mallaloy Flew to Austin from Cleveland and Stole Kill Tony's Entire Episode

Martin Mallaloy booked a flight from Cleveland to Austin, checked in, slept one night at a hotel, and signed up for a bucket pull at Kill Tony. He has schizophrenia, a history of an enlarged prostate that kept him out of comedy for six years, a Habitat for Humanity home acquisition strategy for his love life, and once accidentally killed a frog at the Valley City Frog Jump. He also used to go by Skittles Bill on Opie & Anthony, and Bill Burr and Jim Norton spent an hour trying to get him to kill himself. He did not. He is 60 years old. He got the golden ticket.

This is Kill Tony episode 769, nominally featuring guests Chris O’Connor and Mat Edgar, two actual working comedians who have known Tony Hinchcliffe since 2007 and are, by every reasonable measure, funnier and more professionally accomplished than anyone in the bucket. None of that mattered. The bucket took over, as it always does, and what emerged was one of those episodes that reminds you why the show has spent years outpacing nearly every comedy podcast alive. You cannot write Martin Mallaloy. You cannot cast him. He arrived from a Goodwill frame on a studio apartment wall that nobody can explain.

The Bucket, Ranked by Chaos

Before Mallaloy materialized, the bucket delivered a reasonable spread of Austin’s walking wounded. Ivy Miller, three months into comedy, surfing Portugal half the year, recently single from a man in Lisbon, living what Hinchcliffe correctly identified as an objectively great life with no comedic value whatsoever. BK, who had a stroke in 2010, spent 17 years away from the mic, got laid off from a fintech company on Wednesday, and whose wife is currently in Egypt because her family is from Gaza. Tony’s observation that BK is bombing in Austin while his wife is bombing elsewhere landed with the kind of precision that happens maybe twice a night on a good show. Then came George from Montreal, doing fake-weird bit-comedy in the unenviable slot right after Mallaloy appeared. Chris O’Connor put it plainly.

It’s just hard to go from real weird to fake weird.

Luke Stam, two years sober this month, looked 45 at 29 due to what he described as a scary amount of cocaine, drove drunk every day for six years, and lives in a studio apartment with cement floors and hot sauce stains that have cost him fifteen dollars across three separate incidents. He collects strangers’ photos from Goodwill and invents death narratives for them. He got a big joke book. Later, Eric Blair, a 51-year-old Austin litigator, did a first-ever set about the genetic future of professional basketball that landed somewhere between a fever dream and a closing argument. He escaped a date with a visibly pregnant woman through the restaurant’s back door. Mat Edgar saw the whole arc and delivered the episode’s cleanest line.

So you’re on a date with a pregnant woman and then you aborted the date.

The Golden Ticket

Mallaloy’s minute opened with a paranoid schizophrenic glass joke, moved through a cat-sourced romantic affirmation, detoured into Paris via mushrooms and Ratatouille, and closed with a 9/11 haircut joke that Tony immediately offered a blank check to do more of. The crowd lost it. The band was still laughing. Tony, who has now been hosting this show for over a decade and has watched several thousand bucket pulls, looked genuinely shaken in the best possible way.

All of your personalities were funnier than the other bucket pools we’ve had here tonight.

The interview that followed was its own thing entirely. Mallaloy mentioned the frog he accidentally crushed to death at the Valley City Frog Jump. He mentioned that he had been to Last Comic Standing, wore a straitjacket, told a Republican joke, and was edited out in favor of a fabricated rejection from Norm from Chairs, a judge he was never in the same room with. He mentioned Habitat for Humanity as a housing solution to unlock a potential girlfriend. He sells wristbands that say “made USA by illegals” at a gift shop in Lakewood, Ohio called Salty Not Sweet. He goes by Cleveland Comedian on Instagram. His website is veryfunnycomedy.com. He drove to Austin, he is going home tomorrow, and he told Tony he loves him. The golden ticket was not a surprise. What was surprising is how quickly the whole room understood that this was the real thing, not a bit, not a character, just a man who has been doing comedy since 2004 with an enlarged prostate and schizophrenia and absolutely no intention of stopping.

I get a lot of shit for helping people that are a little bit wacky, but goddamn it, every single thing about you is absolutely hilarious.

O’Connor and Edgar were good company throughout, easy and loose, the kind of desk guests who know when to land a line and when to let the room breathe. Edgar’s Bomb Shelter podcast, where comedians break down their worst bombing experiences, could have booked half this episode’s bucket on the spot. He said as much. The closing regular set from Pat O’Neal, who is quietly becoming the show’s most beloved recurring presence, hit clean and fast. But the night already belonged to a 60-year-old man from Cleveland who squeezed his golden ticket so hard it probably broke.