Calling Colbert homophobic for Trump rant? Don’t make me laugh
Stephen Colbert is facing another rightwing backlash.
And if this new boycott from Donald Trump fans goes as well as their campaigns against Starbucks, Hamilton, Netflix, Pepsi, Star Wars, Macy’s, Google, Budweiser, Microsoft, Nordstrom, Saturday Night Live and Facebook, he may soon break all ratings records in the history of late-night television.
Although Colbert is already a loathsome swine to the dwindling population inside Trumpville, his Late Show monologue on Monday was heard as a snort too far.
After showing a clip of Trump abruptly ending an interview with CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, Colbert gazed into the camera and addressed the president: “When you insult one member of the CBS family, you insult us all.”
This was the pretext for a blistering diatribe of sophomoric taunts. Colbert set out to avenge his colleague at CBS, John Dickerson, by saying things journalists can’t say when they are under verbal fire from the president.
In other words, Colbert harnessed the name-calling, slurs and schoolyard bullying Trump rides each day. He pulled a Trump on Trump.
“Mr. Trump, your presidency, I love your presidency. I call it Disgrace the Nation,” Colbert said, getting warmed up as the audience cheered him on. “You’re not the POTUS; you’re the BLOATUS. You’re the glutton with the button. You’re a regular Gorge Washington. You’re the presi-dunce. But you’re turning into a real prick-tator.”
Colbert then kicked it up to an incendiary level rare for network TV.
“Sir, you attract more skinheads than free Rogaine. You have more people marching against you than cancer. You talk like a sign-language gorilla who got hit in the head. In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c--k holster.”
Uh oh. Cue the jeremiad. Although there were a few more one-liners, the vulgar “holster” line is what crossed the line inside Trumpville as #FireColbert soon trended on Twitter and the comic was accused of being “disgusting,” “shameful,” “anti-American,” “unfunny,” “a scumbag” and, most frequently, “homophobic.”
I will agree with Colbert’s detractors on one point: the holster line was not funny. It was lazy, hackneyed and crude with no comedic benefit. If you went to a local standup show and heard that joke, you’d roll your eyes. The nucleus of the gag — that Trump exists solely to service Putin and that Putin is in control of America — could have been expressed with language as creative as the “sign-language gorilla” crack.
But to call it “homophobic” is just silly. And it quickly lurches from silly to laughably hypocritical when the people accusing Colbert of homophobia are the same ones who never raise a whimper of protest when LGBT rights are targeted by the social conservatives in their ranks who are animated by anti-gay hostility.
I can only assume that gall is the natural resource in Trumpville because it takes a lot of audacity to accuse Colbert of homophobia when Republicans are the ones obsessed with “religious freedom,” which has become code for the right to discriminate. A joke, however uncouth, has no material impact on who can get married, what bathrooms people can use or what services they can be denied.
Trumpville is a place where irrational fear rides roughshod over everything else. It is a place of feverish resentment. It is home to all forms of bigotry masquerading as traditional values. It is where people bob for worm-filled apples in buckets of their own bile. So to believe these narrow-minded whiners are suddenly concerned a comedian may be homophobic is both the set-up and the punchline.
If Colbert made the same joke about Barack Obama, these same people would be doing all the online clip-sharing while laughing the loudest: “Ha ha, he really gave it to that Barry Hussein!”
No, what #FireColbert is really about is the feelings of alienation and persecution some conservatives can’t shake off even when they have all the power: “How dare this smug New York liberal take potshots at our beloved leader? When will we get some respect? Why does Bill O’Reilly get fired as Colbert gets more popular?”
This last point, which echoed across Trumpville this week, crackles with yet another mystery: the inability of the MAGA faithful to distinguish between words and deeds. O’Reilly was fired because of what he did, not what he said. Fox News, which is quite smitten with this week’s faux outrage, is not the victim of a double standard.
It’s under heavy fire because people who worked inside came forward to say it was a den of iniquity lorded over by predatory creeps.
Forget about Colbert’s joke. What the easily triggered snowflakes inside Trumpville should pause to consider is why they are unbothered by accusations of sexual harassment or why they will happily give a pass to Trump when he brags about grabbing women by the crotch, or why scapegoating immigrants for everything is perfectly reasonable, or why their party has become home to a rogues’ gallery of haters, losers and those eager to control the lives of others.
Until then, please, spare us the fight against imaginary homophobia. Sometimes a joke is just a joke. But your positions on real subjects are no laughing matter. vmenon@thestar.ca