The 2 Johnnies have admitted it’s been a “horrendous” week after the backlash they’ve received over an “offensive” clip from their podcast.
The comedy duo, made up of John O’Brien and John McMahon, came under fire last week for uploading a “sexist” and “derogatory” clip from their podcast online.
In a since-deleted video, which was shared ahead of their RTÉ 2FM radio show on Monday, the Tipperary natives read and discussed crude slogans on car stickers sent by listeners of their podcast.
Among the slogans discussed were: “Tyres are like women, no good unless they are squealing” and “She’s not a princess, she’s a s**t.”
The clip sparked serious backlash online, with Social Democrats TD Holly Cairns branding the post “blatantly sexist”.
The RTÉ 2FM stars have since been taken off air, and admitted they don’t know when they are going to return.
Speaking on the latest episode of their podcast, Johnny Smacks said: “It’s horrendous. I woke up on Thursday and turned on Ireland AM. I was watching it as normal and they were going through the front pages and there’s me and you on the front page.”
“My stomach just sunk when I read the headline. I was like ‘F*** sake, this is not what we set out to do.’ It’s awful. It has been a f***ing s*** week.”
“We are obviously taken off air on 2FM, we don’t know what is going to happen there,” he added.
The duo added: “It is s*** for everyone. S*** for us personally, for everyone in the podcast and who work for us, for our families like, Jesus.”
“It is horrendous like. It is an awful feeling to have to ring your mam and have her crying down the phone and your sister and people saying it to her.”
“It is a horrendous thing and I hope nobody has to go through what we went through for the last few days.”
“But we are going to stay doing this podcast, and stay being us, and we are going to learn from this. And we will be better. We understand that we got it wrong and we won’t get it wrong again. Nobody in this world is perfect,” they added.
The 2 Johnnies also apologised once again for how the clips were edited, and admitted that they “didn’t go far enough to condemn” the offensive content.
“Stepping up to bigger stage comes great scrutiny and accountability,” they said. “Regardless of what we are doing outside the podcast, we are accountable to our own standards.”
“We talked about the car stickers and that is our way of reporting what is going on,” they explained.
“Our job as podcasters is to talk about the s*** that is not on mainstream media, and we condemn it in our language saying ‘jaysus that’s mad’ or ‘who would be going around with that’ that is our way of condemning it, but we should have been more clear.”
“And we have apologised for not being better.”
