Colin Moriarty, a co-founder of the popular YouTube channel Kinda Funny, said today that he plans to leave the group. This announcement comes several days after Moriarty drew fire for a controversial Twitter joke targeting women, although to Kinda Funny fans, the split appears to have been a long time coming.
“It’s with a heavy heart and great sadness that I announce my resignation from Kinda Funny, effective immediately,” Moriarty wrote on Facebook today. “This morning, the guys and I had a constructive conversation, and feel that, with our separate visions for the future and for the direction of the company, it’s time to go our separate ways.”
Moriarty, who spent several years at IGN before leaving in 2014 to found Kinda Funny, is a colleague of mine who has long been supportive of Kotaku (I appeared on his show last week). He’s always been outspoken about his conservative political stances, making appearances on various political talk shows including, just this morning, the Glenn Beck radio show. To many Kinda Funny fans, Moriarty’s politics have always seemed at odds with the rest of the group, whose other members skew liberal. Moriarty had often battled with the other Kinda Funny co-founders over various political issues.
Last week, on International Women’s Day, Moriarty tweeted a crummy, poorly targeted joke:
And continued:
Unsurprisingly, these tweets proved controversial, drawing fire from a number of Kinda Funny fans and outside observers. Later that day, Kinda Funny co-founder Greg Miller issued a statement apologizing and noting that Moriarty would no longer be appearing at PAX East in Boston this past weekend. And now, Moriarty has left the group.
“Opportunities are already popping up for me, bringing me in a new, different, and exciting direction, a direction that I feel makes perfect sense for me,” he wrote. “Obviously, you haven’t seen or heard the last of me.”
Although to some extent this split had been building for quite some time—Moriarty’s views often conflicted with Miller’s and the other co-founders’—it appears that this joke was the spark that lit up the gasoline.