Sam Hyde

Samuel Whitcomb Hyde is an American comedian, podcaster, boxer and a co-founder of sketch comedy group Million Dollar Extreme alongside Nick Rochefort and Charls Carroll. Hyde is the co-creator and producer of series such as World Peace and Fishtank.

Hyde has been involved in several public pranks and internet hoaxes. His transgressive style has garnered significant public controversy, and has been heavily linked with the alt-right.

Life and career
Hyde was born in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1985, and was raised in Wilton, Connecticut. He graduated from Wilton High School in 2003. Hyde enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University for one year before transferring to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he graduated in 2007.

In August 2016, Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, a television program Hyde co-wrote and acted in along with the other members of MDE, premiered on Adult Swim. Four months later, it was announced that World Peace would not be renewed for a second season. Hyde alleged that the show was cancelled due to his vocal support for Donald Trump.

In a December 2016 interview with The Hollywood Reporter in the aftermath of his series' cancellation, when questioned if he held a bias towards minorities, Hyde replied: "No, I wouldn’t say that. I would say that I’m probably as racist or as biased as the average regular white guy or the average regular black guy."

In 2017, Hyde pledged $5,000 towards the legal defense fund of Andrew Anglin, the founder and editor of neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. The Southern Poverty Law Center sued Anglin for allegedly organizing a "troll storm" against a Jewish woman in Montana. When Matt Pearce of the Los Angeles Times questioned Hyde about the donation, Hyde asked Pearce if he was Jewish and went on to say that $5,000 was "nothing" to him. Hyde also stated: "Don't worry so much about money. Worry about if people start deciding to kill reporters. That's a quote. For the reason why, you can say I want reporters to know I make more money than them, especially Matt Pearce."

Hyde has been open about his interest in boxing and helped train Canadian YouTuber Harley Morenstein for iDubbbz's charity boxing event Creator Clash. On August 27, 2022, Hyde made his boxing debut, defeating Australian social media star James "IAmThmpsn" Thompson during the 2 Fights 1 Night event.

Fishtank
In April 2023, Hyde launched his live reality TV web show Fishtank (also known as fishtank.live), a 24/7 interactive reality show where a number of contestants cohabitate and interact with viewers in real time for six weeks. The program has been compared to the Big Brother television franchise due to its format, while others have compared it to the Stanford prison experiment after its content.

Season 1 began on April 18, 2023, with eight contestants. Season 2 started on December 18, 2023, with 10 contestants. Filming took place in Cumberland, Rhode Island.

On January 11, 2024, Jeff Mutter, mayor of Cumberland, announced that local authorities were investigating whether steps could be taken in response to local complaints regarding the show filming in a residential part of the town. Three weeks later, ten chickens purchased from a poultry shop in Federal Hill were rescued by a local animal sanctuary on January 27 after reportedly being released in the house "for a comedy bit." Patrick Cole, a spokesman for the Tiverton-based sanctuary, claimed that the show's producers had discussed abandoning the animals before demolition work took place in the house, later contacting them for help.

Pranks
Hyde lampooned the American anime fandom in 2012 when he delivered a spurious presentation titled "Samurai Swordplay in a Digital Age" under the pseudonym "Master Kenchiro Ichiimada" at a convention in Vermont. During the presentation, an MDE affiliate blocked the exit to bar attendees from leaving Hyde's hour-long performance.

In 2013, Hyde, while dressed in a maroon-colored sweatsuit and clad in hoplite-esque breastplate and greaves, delivered a prank TEDx talk titled "2070 Paradigm Shift" at Drexel University. The talk, described by Forbes as a satiric impersonation of a "Brooklyn tech hipster," received significant media attention and praise from The Washington Post. When asked about the intent of the prank, Hyde stated his dislike for TED talks, calling them "really self-congratulatory."

In 2014, Hyde started a fake Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the creation of a "pony dating simulator" for bronies, the adult male fans of the children's television show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The Kickstarter page said the simulator would comprise "a journey that spans multiple continents" and include "deep RPG elements." Devotees of the show who ostensibly took the project seriously pledged a total of $4,161 to the fundraiser before Hyde cancelled it.

Mass shooting hoaxes
Since 2015, Hyde has been frequently misreported as the perpetrator of numerous mass shootings and terrorist attacks by internet trolls on websites such as 4chan and Twitter. The hoaxes, which typically included photos of Hyde brandishing a semi-automatic weapon and with a slightly altered name to appear more "authentic", reappeared so often on social media that The New York Times characterized "Sam Hyde is the shooter" as "an identifiable meme."

The first instance of the prank was the 2015 Umpqua Community College shooting. CNN mistakenly included Hyde's image on their coverage of the shooting. Hyde was also labelled as the perpetrator in high profile shootings such as the Orlando Night Club shooting, Sutherland Springs church shooting (where he was misidentified by Representative Vicente Gonzalez) and the Las Vegas shooting in 2017. Hyde has also been erroneously blamed for many other small scale and large shootings.

Hyde's image was shared across social media as being the driver of the car in Waukesha, Wisconsin, that drove into a Christmas parade in November 2021.

In February of 2022, an edited image of Hyde was misidentified as the "Ghost of Kyiv" (a Ukrainian fighter pilot who supposedly shot down six Russian planes on February 24, 2022) in popular social media posts including that of Representative Adam Kinzinger. The alleged pilot was given Ukrainian style names 'Сем Гайденко' [Sam Haydenko] or Samuyil Hyde.

The 2022 Buffalo shooter also claimed the image of Hyde as his own in his manifesto.

In July 2022, multiple popular posts on social media falsely labelled Hyde as the gunman in the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

An edited image depicting Hyde as a woman was used to falsely identify Hyde as a mass shooter in the 2023 Covenant School shooting under the pseudonym of Samantha Hyde.

In July 2024, Hyde was falsely identified as the perpetrator of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

Creator Clash training
During the weeks prior to Creator Clash, in-between training sessions with his coach Jessy Thompson, Harley Morenstein of Epic Meal Time conducted sparring sessions with Hyde in a parking lot in Rhode Island. The training session with Hyde was documented in a four part vlog documentary uploaded to the Epic Meal Time channel in the lead-up to his fight against Arin Hanson of Game Grumps.

Hyde later went on to train comedy rapper Tyler Cassidy for his match against Chris Ray Gun for the second Creator Clash, scheduled for April 15, 2023. Weeks prior to the event, Cassidy was removed from the lineup of fighters, with William Haynes taking his place, sparking controversy and boycotts from fans of both Hyde and Cassidy. Cassidy accused iDubbbz of removing him from the card due to personal grudges against Hyde that stem from the filming of the documentary Getting Away With It. According to Cassidy and many fans of both creators, a potential major factor was that he had previously made jokes about subscribing to iDubbbz's wife's OnlyFans. In a video uploaded by iDubbbz titled "Addressing the Froggy Fresh Drama", he criticizes Hyde for relentlessly harassing him, his wife Anisa Jomha, and other influencers who have fought on Creator Clash, such as Nathan Barnatt.

Hyde vs. Thompson
Signing onto Happy Punch Promotions, Hyde was announced to make his boxing debut on KSI's "2 Fighters, 1 Night" undercard against Australian TikTok violinist, James "IAmThmpsn" Thompson. Throughout the fight week press conferences, Hyde donned Irish persona dubbed "The Candyman", in which Hyde would talk in a thick Irish accent, wear bizarre Irish-related clothing, reading candy-centric poems written to intimidate Thompson, and entertain audiences and the media to generate hype for the match. On August 27, 2022, Hyde defeated Thompson in the third round by TKO. After the fight, Hyde called out left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker by threatening to murder him at his house, while remaining in-character as the Candyman, saying "I am going to stalk him and become obsessed with him, and wear his makeup, and his dresses, and use his skin as a coat like the ancient Irish did."

Publications
Books
 * How to BOMB the U. S. Gov't: The OFFICIAL Primo(tm) Strategy Guide to the Collapse of Western Civilization, with Nick Rochefort and Charls "Coors" Carroll. COM98 LLC (2016). ISBN 0997917601.

Filmography
Television
 * Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace (2016, 6 episodes) – various, creator, screenwriter, producer