You might know Sal Vulcano as one of the comedians on the wildly successful TruTV prank show Impractical Jokers. He hosts the series with his lifelong best friends, James “Murr” Murray, Brian “Q” Quinn, and previously, Joe Gatto.
Well, recently, he sparked backlash after an offensive audio appeared in one of his TikTok posts.
Last week, a post promoting Sal’s upcoming “Everything’s Fine Tour” was uploaded to his TikTok account. The post included disturbing audio from Nick Fuentes, a far-right activist who first gained attention at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. He is known for sharing racist, antisemitic, and other problematic rhetoric and has been deemed an extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In the audio, Nick makes offensive and stereotypical comments about Jewish people, Black people, and women, repeatedly using the N-word and the word “bitches” to describe women. “It is what it is,” he says in the audio.
Some speculated that the clip was either a prank assigned by one of Sal’s co-stars or an accident. As it turns out, Sal claims it was the latter, caused by TikTok assigning random audio to the upload.
“My social media team posted my tour poster across all my social platforms,” he said in a follow-up post. Sal explained that when his team initially added the tour dates to TikTok, they did so without audio.
“I found out today, when I was alerted of this post, that TikTok will assign their own trending audio to your posts even if you don’t post any audio.”
Sal said the audio of Nick was trending on the platform and wound up being automatically assigned to his video.
“Which is unfortunate,” he added. “At first, I thought I was hacked, but no. No, not at all. I don’t know why they will allow something like that to trend and then actually assign it to people’s videos.”
He added that he has since heard similar stories from other users and encouraged viewers to be cautious when posting.
“Obviously, I would never post anything like that,” Sal continued, adding that he plans to follow up with TikTok privately about the matter.