Zach not only Woods, Zach Will. (Go there, that is!)
Photo: Stewart Cook/Getty Images
On Thursday, December 4, and Tuesday, December 9, writer and director Quentin Tarantino was fatally owned in a double-tap strike by comedy mercenary Zach Woods. Woods’s vigilante justice was a response to Tarantino’s unwarranted and reality-divorced criticism of Paul Dano on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, where the Kill Bill director called Dano “the weakest fucking actor in SAG.” The comments galvanized seemingly half of Hollywood to unite, “We Are the World” style, in support of Dano and his acting abilities, with even Daniel Day-Lewis coming out of the Reynolds woodwork to protect his boy Eli. But no one’s defense of Dano has been quite as artful and poetic as Woods’s ad hominem eviscerations of Tarantino.
In his first video, Woods speaks up in the name of “us very weird-looking white boys” standing together and deploys the most succinct critique of Tarantino’s later films to date, saying that they all amount to him “taking a historical villain — slave owners, Nazis, the Manson family — and then using them as a thin pretext to enact your same old tired pornographic violence, and then some shot of feet and the N-word.” It’s the kind of roast that makes one suspect that Woods might be possessed by Joan Rivers’s ghost, and also makes one think that the Oscars or Golden Globes ought to book him as their host. He looks great in a tux!
Woods returned for seconds on Tuesday with a video that starts as a fake-out apology by calling Tarantino “one of the masters …,” before following it up with “… of ripping off Asian directors, you bitch! You rip off everyone, from Hong Kong auteurs to Bill Maher’s barber, and you look weird as shit — and that’s coming from a guy who looks like a bird had sex with another more tired bird.” I won’t spoil his whole monologue, because it’s a more riveting cri de coeur than the “To be or not to be” scene in Hamnet, but I will share his best, most devastating bars: “The only movie I want to see you in is Ring camera footage of you having a stroke in your own home. And when I say ‘having a stroke,’ I don’t mean masturbating to one of your own Blu-ray commentaries.” He then unearths a clip of Tarantino defending Roman Polanski on The Howard Stern Show in 2003. Call him Little Miss Woods-comma-Zach, the way he just won his case.
Woods has been on a hot streak of using his masterful posting abilities for good this year, coming for A-list comedians who participated in the Riyadh Comedy Festival, getting dogs adopted, and convincing Vulture readers that the song of summer for 2025 was “The Macarena.” No katana raised against Woods shall prosper.
