In December, my colleague Kevin Fallon wrote a very thoughtful piece criticizing Saturday Night Live and others for their deeply lame and deeply homophobic jokes about Trump and Putin being in a gay relationship.
“What is the joke here?” Fallon asked. “Is it the idea that outing a powerful political leader is the greatest way to bring him shame? (Which is irresponsible and offensive.) Is it that suggesting that Trump is somehow demeaning himself by submitting to gay sexual acts is the most effective way to mock how beholden he is to Putin’s control? (Which is irresponsible and offensive.) Or is it that there is nothing worse we can think of to say about a ‘masculine’ straight man than that he fucks other dudes? (Which is… yep, irresponsible and offensive.)”
I don’t see the joke here either, and SNL is far from the only culprit, with The New York Times’ Frank Bruni penning Trump-Putin romantic fanfic (and the Times publishing an entire animated video envisioning the pair on romantic dates), Late Show host Stephen Colbert angrily referring to Trump as “Vladimir Putin’s cock holster” after the president insulted his pal (and network-mate) John Dickerson. (He later apologized.)
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On Friday night, HBO’s Real Time returned after a hiatus of nearly two months. And host Bill Maher fired off yet another dumb homophobic joke at Trump.
“Not much has been going on. Been kind of a slow news period,” joked Maher at the top of his monologue. “The big story was the FBI, we found out, was investigating the president of the United States for being a Russian agent,” said Maher, adding. “And spoiler alert: he is.”
The comedian then laid out the case for why he thinks Trump is a “Russian agent.”
“There’s been a lot of evidence for this, right?” offered Maher. “He did nothing when they told him Russia was meddling in our elections; he fired Comey when he was looking into that shit; he wants to get out of NATO; he met Putin five times—that’s a lot of times in a couple of years, always with nobody around. Nobody can know what they’re doing.”
Then the punch line: “Forget collusion, I want to know if there’s penetration.”
Ugh. Please, stop with the Trump-Putin gay jokes. They’re not funny, they’re just hateful.
