James Veitch

James Veitch performs with a clicker in his hand and a large projection screen behind him. The rhythm of a set is not setup and punchline, but send and receive. He plays a cheerful innocent who takes spam emails at face value. He clicks to show the broken English of a scammer, lets the room read the slide, and then leans into the microphone to read his own absurd replies aloud.

He built a large audience outside the traditional club system, getting tens of millions of views on TED Talks. In August 2020, he released a standup special on HBO Max. Days later, multiple women came forward with allegations of rape and sexual assault from his time as a graduate student at Sarah Lawrence College. The streaming platform pulled the special immediately, his agency dropped him, and he vanished from the industry.

The act was mostly one long bit. He tapped into the specific satisfaction of wasting a bad person’s time, turning a simple phishing attempt into a standoff over toaster ovens or giant shipments of gold.

The format boxed him in. Because the punchlines were just screenshots of his outbox, the live show often played like a group reading assignment. The crowd laughed at the text on the screen, not the person standing next to it. Take the projector away, and the act ceased to exist.