After a performance at the New York Comedy Festival on Saturday, Anthony Jeselnik told the crowd that Comedy Central has canceled The Jeselnik Offensive. The Laugh Button provides the firsthand account, noting that while Comedy Central hasn’t given official word on the show’s fate, a cancellation makes sense by the numbers: By the end of its second season in August, Offensive’s ratings had slipped to about half of its first-season audience. Death-by-numbers would be an oddly banal end for Jeselnik’s show, which courted the wrath of network brass as a matter of routine—like when Eric Andre lit firecrackers on the set, or when Jeselnik made jokes about the Boston Marathon bombing mere hours after the smoke had cleared.
But as Jeselnik told The A.V. Club earlier this year, the network has been on board with the show’s edge-pushing mission since the first episode, in which Jeselnik told cancer jokes to a cancer support group. Nevertheless, that’s how it goes with Comedy Central’s programming executives: They love you until they don’t. With Jeselnik leading his audience in a cheer of “Fuck you, Comedy Central!” on Saturday, it looks like this relationship has moved decidedly into the “don’t” phase.