Can we talk about how an unfunny comedian in 2016 thought that calling Donald Trump "Drumpf" would make him lose the election?
I was working on someone’s house the other day and they offered me a cup of coffee and when I looked at the mug I had been handed it said “But first, covfefe” on it
The mug the lady (Gen X stay at home mom married to a software engineer) was drinking out of had a little cartoon depiction of Ruth Bader Ginsburg wearing a crown with the caption “NOTORIOUS R.B.G.”
Other mugs I noticed in their cabinet included an “I’m with her” Hilary 2016 mug and one that said “World’s Okay-est Dad” (this one was kind of funny, Dads r*ck)
Covfefe was actually hilarious. The president is writing a rant and dozes off or gets distracted and so it trails off as nonsense and he just leaves it there and claims implausibly that it's a secret message. That's a funny thing that happened! Jokes about it weren't good because they didn't add anything. They just pointed at the funny thing that already existed but it was funny.
Typos make me pee my pants laughing! Hilarious
The fact that he also published the tweet unfinished ads something.
when the sitting prez does it yeah it is funny. if he kept doing it over and over it wouldn’t be, but it was just the one time and yea it was hilarious at the time. don’t u remember
I’ll give you funny or humorous but the only people who have ever found this hilarious are msnbc liberals with rocks for brains. It’s the orange man bad type. It’s crazy to me so many people in here found it hilarious, I really didn’t think that type of liberal was spending anytime here
people exaggerate for emphasis when speaking casually
So covfefe isn’t hilarious? Cause I think a lot of people here would disagree
why do you think that
People said they found it hilarious
people exaggerate for emphasis when speaking casually
It was pretty funny you’re just butthurt. If Biden or Obama did the same thing it would be equally hilarious
Idk maybe but i feel like trump has done plenty of hilariously stupid things, i just think thinking a typo is hilarious is peak msnbc reddit behavior
Even conservatives laugh at it. Many conservative podcasters made Covfefe a regular part of their shows. Because many conservatives find him to be an objectively funny human being (in a positive way)
i think a lot of us were that kind of liberal 8 years ago but have since changed, i know i’m not the only former h*llary voter here.
but even still, you never found it funny when biden wanders off at g7 or says his uncle was eaten by cannibals, breaks down at the debate or anything else absurd? trump was really funny on twitter. if biden knew how to use it he would be too, albeit unintentionally
Trump has done a ton of hilariously stupid things I just think this one is more in line with msnbc Reddit humor where they get a boner over a typo. I mean they made coffee mugs and shirts with cofeve, it’s the left wing version of let’s go Brandon. I wouldn’t say that is hilarious either
Loser
I’m agreeing with you, it’s hilarious!
Yes
Redditors entering a shamanic trance by chanting Drumpf with a rolled r.
Reddit about to Lisan al Gaib Kamala Harris
Reddit soy phenotype in kente garb delivering spoken word political slam poetry, each "Drumpf" punctuated with a bongo drum roll.
More broadly, 99% of media during the Trump era was based on the hope of Trump commenting on it and signal boosting the material. It was pick me energy for tv shows and podcasts. The entire business model was "gee I hope Trump tweets about me." The absolute zenith of success for John Oliver would be for Trump to acknowledge the "Drumpf" thing, thereby boosting his show's ratings. Trump was a media kingmaker in a very ass backwards way.
yep, there's likely a lot of journalists who say "I don't like Trump but he made my career" behind closed doors
I wonder what percentage of the bourgeoisie actually want him back.
If I were a DEI consultant, I’d vote for Trump
Who are some examples of this where journalists “careers were made” by trump shitting on them? (Other than like the Rachel maddow types who obviously benefitted a lot from trump hysteria but would have still been successful TV talking heads regardless if he has ever come around)
I know of a center left podcast that really started picking up after Trump came into office.
Felt like NPR basically gave everybody a show under the whole #RESIST banner where it was just slightly higher brow reads of Wikipedia and all this junkfood to feed into panic.
On top of that you had tons of people doing their pieces of "<blank> is why Trump got elected" whether they were known writers or not prior. Obviously it wasn't what made her career but the fact Lindy West was doing essential tumblr posts as NYT op ed about 90s media being why people voted for Trump was one of many moments of oxygen wasted on complete nonsense.
That wasn't what I was talking about. You're straight and your dick is huge!
lmao fuck
Maggie Haberman. There was also a guy who I think wrote for Bloomberg and has written a book or two about him, was covering him in great detail since the 80s but I forget his name
Yea I think everyone saw how SNL had suddenly become culturally relevant for the first time in a long time and tried to mock him in a way to get them angry enough to tweet about it.
This whole bit relied on the fact that Trump made fun of Jon Stewart for changing his name, and that was somehow hypocritical because Trumps grandfather had changed the family name. It was pretty stupid. There’s plenty of real stuff to mock trump about, but I think just the sheer volume of goofy trump shit + the fact that he is the most famous man on earth right now lead to a situation where everyone was milking the same cow and there was probably- good trunp but for every 100 bad ones.
SNL's obsession with him was even funnier because just a few years earlier he had been a friend of the show, appearing in friendly Apprentice parodies and the like
Yea that was when he was a democrat and trying to be the head of the nyc cultural elite.
Lots happens when New Yorkers move to florida
He literally hosted the show in 2016. It’s truly wild how they went from that to a few months later having Kate McKinnon doing the sad piano cold open thing after he won
The most stupid thing is that Trump grandpa changed the family name because he was ostracized during ww1 because it sounded too German. When the woke crowd makes fun of it, it sorta backfire because "Haha look at him, he had the change his family name because of racism, what a fucking loser" sort of defeat their own point about him being racist.
They really thought they had something with the “Drumpf” thing. I wonder if they would also make fun of Mark Cuban or Winona Ryder.
It really gives Sunny Hostin making fun of Nikki Haley for Americanizing her name, when Sunny's actual name is Hosseini or something
that years oscars was insufferable ( more than usual at least)
to be fair the ending was hilarious. moonlight u guys won best picture come on up
I went to a trivia night at my college the next day and the team of poli-sci majors next to us would not stop talking about downloading the google chrome extension that auto-changed Trump to Drumpf
Epic
They really pwned him
I had one of those extensions except it was to autochange “millennial” to “snake people”
You need the Racism Simulator extension, which swaps the words “white” and “black” on sh*tlib news sites
I never understood what the point of that was. Just making fun of his ancestor's funny sounding foreign name? Are we in middle school?
Is this the liberal version of saying Barack HUSSIEN Obama?
I think that was a lowbrow attempt to connect an American president with the leader/former leader of a country we were at war with.
Lol they put a guy named Eisenhower in charge of the largest American army ever assembled to invade Germany and then made him president. I think America is well over that.
Maybe John Oliver’s own shame over being from an island with a German royal family is the origin of this joke.
Not comparable. A guy with a vaguely Germanic and fully anglicized last name that had no famous counterparts in Nazi Germany to compare to vs a guy with the middle name “Hussein” up against a guy named Hussein.
exactly. maybe comparable if eisenhowers middle name was adolf.
people were unmistakably trying to equivocate obama with iraq and therefore with 9/11 (they are ret@rded) when they said Barack Hussain Obama
Trump/Drumpf really does give the whole Obama/Osama thing
What are you talking about? Osama led Al-queda. Who is drumpf?
remember when fox news in like 2005 always insisted on saying Usama? it was like their style guide or something. all other media just said Osama.
i was in 5th grade and had to do current events presentations every week
Arabic has no standard transliteration system (like the Chinese do with pinyin). The vowel in Osama in pronounced as an intermediate between English short U and long O. It’s the same thing with the name Omar ibn al Khattab, companion of Mohammed and second Rashidun caliph. His name is sometimes spelled Umar.
Universal Basic Laden
Arabic uses a different alphabet, so news orgs use their own style guides for phonetic translations.
Jesus seems like this sub got 100 times more regarded after the debates.
i was just saying no news org said it that way except for one. i know arabic has its own alphabet ret@rd
Jesos
I've always found it funny that in the US guys were trying to link him to Sadam via Hussein while my Mexican highschool friends and me would call him Obomba & Obama Bin Laden to mess with the one ultra liberal American teacher
Did that teacher call you all latinx?
Nah, this was back in 2010-11
It's trying to be a gotchya moment or revealing some sort of hypocrisy (he hates immigrants but several generations ago he was an immigrant, WOW!), when essentially if you're a white American yeah duh of course?
But like you said, the root of the "humor" is that Drumpf is just a funny sounding word, which is kinda true but also it's a foreign name so again, of course? Isn't it culturally insensitive to say "haha that person has a silly sounding name"?
It's like when they call homophobic people closeted, they pretend the hypocrisy is what makes that funny when in reality the joke is still essentially "haha that person is gay!"
nah it was about trump calling out John Stewart on his real last name of “Lieberman” or whatever
Yea and Stewart changed his own name and trumps grandpa changed the family name.
Using a stage name and an immigrant in the turn of the century anglicizing a family name are both totally normal things that don’t require any bits from comedians
Are you telling me that Awkwafina is in fact, NOT a Brazilian soccer player
Well she is not called Awkwafinho, is she?
Awkwafina de Ipanema
Leibowitz (i.e. Jewish)
I have a dorky sounding German last name too, and I actually felt kind of sympathetic to him when people were poking fun of his ancestors last name. People have made fun of my last name my entire life lol
Don't just rub the tip round the edges bro, shove it in us
Mentlegen does sounds fascist.
When people first started saying it, I had no idea what the origin was, I thought it was just a corruption of his name to sound like the word "dumb" and to sound German, implying that he is both dumb and a Nazi.
This is the core of John Oliver’s humor. He has a good research team but he’s otherwise cringe
From memory when it happened (I couldn’t be bothered going back to look for it), he acknowledged that Trump was correct that his surname was strong branding because the name “Trump” has such a strong and victorious connotation to it, hence why he revealed Drumpf.
The point was to point out the discrepancy between his pubic persona as a stable business genius and the reality of him being a fairly consistent failure in multiple business ventures and not all that smart. His reasoning was that the name "Trump" was synonymous with wealth and success in American pop culture, so they should call him something silly instead.
He was funny on The Bugle and some early Daily Show. But on Last Week Tonight he was just an avatar for a roomful of writers doing focus-grouped humor. Like 0% of that show is his own comedic voice. He was just making a lot of money to be there.
Mulldog once said watching that show is watching someone do their job technically proficiently in the sense that the jokes are "good" but lack any substance or uniqueness to them
Real ones remember The Bugle
Who could forget the Pun Runs
seeing him on random British panel shows from like 20 years ago was so weird. he looked like a real person.
It’s an odd experience because I broadly agree with his points but his delivery makes me irrationally mad
that format needs to have a lot of sincerity underlying it to work. it's why Jon Stewart works, those that followed him just come across as smug asshole comedians. colbert was an outlier when he was just making fun of fox news, and quickly become the worst example of it when he dropped the character.
Stewart was fun in the Bush years but at some point it was just too much him making faces at the news and the audience going wild. Oliver actually had an original spin on the format, too, with the deep dive bit, but the joke writing is really bad and formulaic.
It’s just really exhausting and not fun to watch
I kind of like the reporting they do on the shows, but the jokes are so insufferable I can't watch it.
I once had an adfree unofficial YouTube app that allowed the community to edit segments so they could be skipped (ad reads and stuff like that) but all the Last Week Tonight videos also had user created skips for literally every joke. It was beautiful.
If you're talking about vanced it's back just fyi
I know there was revanced but I could never get it to work.
The show is painfully unfunny but it’s by far the most informative of any comedy news show. I like Daily Show now that Stewart is back but it’s not exactly breaking news. Gotta give John Oliver respect for finding a way to bring some real investigative journalism to the masses
Last week tonight is still on lol
Ha I guess he's dead to me, thus the past tense.
This corporate Democrat humor makes me so irate
I thought it was funny that Colbert obviously hated Adam Conover when he came on his show- like him, Oliver, and Stewart haven’t become the same sort of loser…
His politics aside, Stephen Colbert is a well-educated and humble guy with a deep comedy pedigree. Adam Conover is the opposite.
That’s true- it’s just sad to see Stewart and Colbert’s career drop because they used to be funnier
Stewart has been really funny as of late. He's the best of them
Really- I thought the debate coverage was pretty disappointing
haven't seen that one yet. I'm about 3 weeks behind
I know that tim scott is a gay man. That I know.
John Oliver is Noam Chomsky for libs who don't read books
Those were (and still are to a degree) the days when shitlibs would unironically be proud of the fact they got their news from “comedians”
Then the right did the same with Rogan
And now we’re here, in a world where nobody actually knows what’s real or true anymore
John Stewart left and the void was filled by these hokey losers. Now he’s back and looks like shit, but way funnier than these dildos
I love Jon Stewart and the daily show was amazing when he hosted it, but he is the transition point from a guy just having a basic cable satire news show to comedians somehow forming the lens through which we see the world.
Maher, Rogan, Oliver, all the various late night hosts somehow having the clout that they do is because of Jon Stewart.
Maher is a contemporary of Stewart though. He's been doing the show for over 20 years.
Maher owns his shit lib stance though. Boomer libs love him, conservatives hate him, but they know where he stands.
These comedian types like Stewart masquerade themselves as centrists who are bent on seeking out the truth, which just happens to be what the DNC supports
Actually the boomercons have started to like Maher – he's frequently cited on Fox News as an "old-school liberal" who's willing to stick it to the wokes (even though he still thinks Trump is basically Hitler). Like with friend group litmus tests irl, the vibe is that libs ask for everything and cons will take anything
I think they always sort of liked him, he was just ostracized during the trump years. I remember my fox news dad watching Maher in the 00s. He disagreed with him on stuff but it was a way for him to feel like he was getting "both sides". He became an enemy during the MAGA fervor because he was anti-trump, but now he's back in their good graces for being "anti-woke".
*After over-thinking this a bit more I'll add: Bill Maher might be the smuggest bitch on the planet but he's smug in a different way than your average shit-lib. He's most smug when he's arguing against the Dem establishment. When he's arguing as a liberal against a conservative, suddenly he's all let's reach across the aisle and get along. This makes him palatable to cons who want to feel like they're smart for hearing both sides and libs who don't want to be seen as gay for watching MSNBC. Until Trump, then he became a pearl-clutching soy boy like the rest of em, so they tuned him out, but now he's back in for being anti-woke.
Stewart is still good at times. Fallon, Myers, Oliver, Noah and the rest - throw them all out
I feel like nobody took trump winning seriously in 2016, media treated him as a joke like RFK, but more mainstream.
Completely destroyed the ability to have an actual conversation about him in the entire western world
Incredibly annoying thing UK libs did is they copied it but for Boris Johnson and you would get them being like "Boris - Sorry! I mean Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a spectacular spunkcrumpet and he needs to get in the bloody sea!" you still see the odd one doing it I don't know what they think is going to happen
Tories get in the bin (they will tomorrow tbh)
To clarify I will be glad if they lose also I just dislike that particular kind of person who does the Pfeffel thing
Same, it's definitely time for them to move on.
proud england will never willingly be ruled by one with german blood
he's turkish too
I don't think a single comedian ever learned how to make Trump funny. I said from the jump that it was a stupid idea for SNL to have Alec Baldwin do a normal impression of him because the real Trump is more ridiculous than their impression.
Seriously, if you guys were writing SNL, how would you have parodied Trump? I think they needed to go all the way over-the-top and make him super fat and disgusting like Ben Stiller at the end of Dogeball or Fat Bastard. Idk if that would have worked, but I think SNL (and everyone else) played it way too safe.
I doubt that would've worked either. Their problem is that Trump is legitimately funny but their hatred of him prevents them from admitting it, so they've set themselves the impossible task of parodying a comedian while pretending that he's not one
The new guy did does a good impression. He matches the voice, but also the bizarre stream of consciousness
Only thing that would get under his skin would be a drag queen Trump impersonator.
Come on through The Vivienne!
One thing Rogan was actually spot on about is Trump is a comedian himself. He has great charisma , comedic timing, off the cuff comments, and is just cartoonish looking himself.
He is funnier than those who are trying to parody him. In fact, I guarantee you that anyone in your peer group that has done or does Trump parodies (we all have one) is an unfunny dork
It's ok to dislike Trump and think he is funny as shit
This was why they hired Shane Gillis until they fired him
Sean Gillis does a good trump impersonation
Tim Heideker is essentially Trump for a lot of On Cinema arguments.
as an englishman this guy perplexes me. he comes across as an English character designed by an American. his accent, looks etc. plus he's pretty much unknown here
Send this cunt back to the UK already so he can wallow in his own country collapsing.
From 4chan:
“The subject of john oliver came up when a colleague (fellow psychologist) and I were discussing politics a few months ago. Although we were both in agreement regarding the general shitlib inanity of the HBO show, my friend was surprised when I explained that the real insidiousness of it is its unmistakably hypnotic structure and pacing
I ended up pulling up an episode or two off of youtube to show her what I meant. All of the segments I've ever seen from this show follow the same repetitive format: present some "argumentation" and "facts" for about 10 seconds, then quickly follow these up with a snarky quip (which themselves overwhelmingly take the form of complete non-sequitur or otherwise absurd metaphor) before any rational processing of the preceding argument can take place in the mind of the viewer. Further telling is that the only 'beats' or mental pauses in the show's pacing exist solely to highlight the approving laughter or applause of the studio audience. Repeat this basic formula without variation 20-40 times in a row and you have one of the 12-20 minute 'segments' that form the backbone of the show.
The end effect is (obviously) not to deliver information, but rather to literally teach the viewers - on a subconscious level -- to mentally associate derisive laughter with any person or opinion that is at odds with the narrative's take on the chosen issue. And it accomplishes this by maintaining a strict adherence to a roughly 20-second cycle in which a stimulus is presented, and a response is cued. This is the sense in which the show is fundamentally hypnotic in effect -- even mores than its precursors in the genre (Daily Show, Colbert, etc).
To my mind, oliver's show is representative of the media's increasing mastery of the methodologies of mass conditioning; in fact it is almost such a perfect technical accomplishment that I would almost have to admire it on technical grounds, which moreover is in the hands of the entirely wrong people”
I hope he dies real soon
oliver?
Any/all of them really
Current year man
COME ON, IT'S 2024 PEOPLE
It’s a prerogative of the liberal ethos.
They need to lose to assume a certain moral high ground. You can feel it in the air, they’re dying for trump to win to take up the resistance once again.
ugh my cousin says this and i don't know how to explain to her how it comes off
holy fuckstickles, glormpf just got fucking owned!!
Is that Adam Friedland?
So cringe right Lmfao ew what a moron! U done now?
John Oliver is cool because he's anti-American.
Covfefe and Drumpf gang gang
I still have the drumpfinator plugin installed on chrome
He did lose tho. The election was rigged
Before any of you freaks push back I think 2020 was rigged too
Enlightened centrism
Ppl are downvoting me bc they can’t handle the truth. Remember they downvoted galleio to
6 missing replies
I’m more of a covfefe kind of guy