The sudden departure of Tucker Carlson from his post as the face of Fox News Monday sent shock waves through the worlds of politics and media—and nobody seemed more surprised than Late Night host Seth Meyers—who just returned from a two-week vacation to an onslaught of news Monday.
“When I heard that news I went through all the stages of Tucker’s face in one sitting,” Meyers said, showing a supercut of the cable host’s signature hyperbolic expressions.
“First I was shocked, then I was confused, then I did the Tucker laugh,” he added, faking a chuckle that sounded uncannily like the canned mirth Carlson has become known for.
ADVERTISEMENT
“But then I had so many questions,” Meyers continued. “What are we going to do without Tucker? Who else is going to tell us when M&M’s aren’t fuckable anymore?”
Meyers was particularly amused by Fox News’ own on-air announcement about the network’s break-up with Carlson, which Meyers said “felt like a decree from state television in some sort of weird, cult-like dictatorship.”
But he was even more surprised by just how swiftly Carlson’s disappearing act happened, which meant that Carlson’s (presumably) last-ever Fox News segment wasn’t some tearful, conspiracy theory-riddled farewell, but a promo for a new Tucker-produced special titled Let Them Eat Bugs.
Carlson signed off on Friday night by promising “We’ll be back on Monday,” to which Meyers responded: “No you won’t. Turns out even that was a lie.”
Ultimately, however, Meyers thinks that the surprise ouster was really the most “fitting end” for Carlson, “because he was always terrified he would lose his show after getting canned at two other cable networks—CNN and MSNBC. And he was specifically afraid that Donald Trump would be the one to destroy him. Which is why Tucker spent so much time spoon-feeding Trump’s bullshit to his viewers, despite knowing it was all bullshit.”
Much has been made about the fact that Carlson’s canning comes less than a week after Fox News was ordered to pay just shy of $800 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems—the same lawsuit that showed us how Carlson hates Trump “passionately” and considers the former president “a demonic force.”
Meyers said it seemed “poetic” that one of Carlson’s last acts as a Fox News employee was to be sent down to Mar-a-Lago “to grovel in an interview with Trump, where he pretended to be fascinated by every word Trump uttered.”
The result, Meyers added, was Carlson looking less like a 53-year-old “journalist” and more like “a 12-year-old listening to his older brother talking about touching a female breast for the first time.”
For more, listen and subscribe to The Last Laugh podcast.
