On Sunday night, John Oliver took some more shots at his new favorite target: Tucker Carlson, the white nationalist-adjacent Fox News anchor, former bow tie enthusiast, and heir to the Swanson TV dinner fortune.
Two weeks ago, when Carlson claimed that the protests in Minneapolis were worse than “police brutality,” Oliver said, “OK, first: Fuck you, Tucker... people like Tucker love to venerate order at moments like this, and that’s easy to do when order in its current form is designed to benefit and protect you.” Carlson’s George Floyd protest rant (and all the dog whistle-filled rants in its wake) cost the entitled blowhard a bunch of his sponsors. Last week, Oliver told him to fuck himself again.
This time, Oliver took issue with Carlson’s bizarre rant against…Sesame Street.
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“Sesame Street and CNN held a town hall to explain the current moment to children—which didn’t please all kids. In fact, just wait for one giant baby’s reaction,” offered Oliver.
He then threw to Carlson, who ran a clip of a Sesame Street character saying, “Across the country, people of color, especially in the Black community, are being treated unfairly because of how they look.”
“It’s a children’s show. Got that, Bobby? America is a very bad place and it’s your fault,” yelled Carlson at a Sesame Street clip. “So no matter what happens, no matter what they do to you when you grow up, you have no right to complain.”
Oliver was, once again, beside himself. “First, obviously: Fuck off, Tucker, you one-man homeowner’s association. And second, that unspecified ‘they’ in ‘what they do to you when you grow up’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There’s basically two options for what that could mean. One, that Tucker and his viewers have benefited from a racist system that renders any specifications of who they are unnecessary; or two, that his show is a badly written piece of garbage.”
Then, the kicker: “So which is it, Tucker? Are you a racist or are you a total fucking moron? The answer can be, and indeed is, both.”
It seems Oliver’s following in the footsteps of his comedy mentor, Jon Stewart, who famously ripped Carlson to shreds on CNN’s Crossfire, calling him a “dick” and mocking his ridiculous bow tie.
