Jimmy Kimmel
On Thursday night, late-night hosts tore into Fox, the network which airs the reality show The Masked Singer, after the former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was unmasked during a recent taping.
“The guy who’s trying to destroy our country? He’s singing on a show!” mocked Jimmy Kimmel.
“How does this even happen?” he wondered. “I mean, a lot of people at Fox had to sign off on this – not one of them was like, ‘Hey maybe we shouldn’t have the guy who’s under investigation for helping to plot an insurrection singing on our show?’”
“Why would Rudy even agree to do this? Was he thinking he was going to the Masked Singer Landscaping Company?” Kimmel continued, referencing Giuliani’s infamous appearance at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in November 2020.
“Only Rudy Giuliani would try to overthrow the government, break wind loudly in court, sweat hair dye all over one press conference, have another one next to a dildo store, and then try to rehabilitate his image by singing Shake Your Groove Thing dressed as a pineapple,” he added.
As for the network that cast Giuliani for the show – “Fox Network really should be ashamed of themselves,” said Kimmel. “They should have another show after The Masked Singer that night called The Masked Executives – all the Fox executives come out in costumes. The one who greenlit this idea takes off the mask and gets voted off television forever.”
Stephen Colbert
“No headline has captured the national zeitgeist of existential dread combined with ridicu-stupo-lousiness better than this,” said Stephen Colbert of Giuliani’s Masked Singer appearance. “That’s right – the criminal goon that we know for a fact is being investigated for trying to overthrow our democracy for his idiot emperor was yuckin’ it up on a reality show!”
Fox has not revealed what Giuliani sang for his “swan song” or what his costume was, “but it’s safe to assume he was a jackass”, Colbert quipped.
A lot of people were upset by the reveal, “but it may not be the producers’ fault”, he joked. “It’s possible that Rudy got drunk and wandered on to the Fox lot and passed out in a costume.”
Even people on the show disagreed with the decision to cast Giuliani; upon Giuliani’s reveal, according to Deadline, judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke left the stage in protest. “Or they left in terror,” mused Colbert. “I mean, one of the most chilling phrases in the English language is ‘surprise, it’s Rudy Giuliani!’”
Trevor Noah
Brian Flores sues the NFL for racial discrimination and @roywoodjr has a solution for pointless head coaching interviews. pic.twitter.com/TwDBDT1jiW
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) February 4, 2022
And on the Daily Show, Trevor Noah discussed a new lawsuit against the NFL alleging racial discrimination in its hiring of head coaches. The former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores is suing three teams and the league itself, which he claims “is racially segregated and is managed much like a plantation”.
Flores, who is Black, was fired by the Dolphins last month despite leading the team to its first back-to-back winning seasons since 2003. The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, alleges poor treatment by the Dolphins organization and that the New York Giants interviewed him for a head coaching position after it had already decided on a white coach.
The superfluous interview would have fulfilled the NFL’s Rooney rule, which requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate for head coaching positions. “Which is cool, but now Brian Flores is saying these interviews he’s getting? They’re not real,” said Noah. “These teams are just going through the motions to satisfy the Rooney rule.
“Think of it this way: it’s almost like when your mom emails you that her friend from church, her son is moving to your city, and she wants you to be friends with him,” he continued. “And yeah, you go get a beer with him, just to make your mom happy, but you know for a fact you’re never gonna hire him for your friend.”
In his lawsuit, Flores highlights a glaring lack of diversity in the NFL’s coaching ranks. More than two-thirds of the league’s players are Black, but there is only one black head coach for 32 teams – two fewer than when the rule was instituted in 2003. “So the Rooney rule is basically as useless as the five-second rule,” said Noah.
On top of that, Black coaches in general advance slower and have shorter tenures than white coaches. “Now, is the NFL doing this on purpose to Black coaches? Nobody knows,” Noah mused. “I mean, maybe. Or maybe it’s an unconscious bias. And that’s what makes racism so hard to prove these days. Because back in the day, when someone was being racist to you, you knew. Because they’d be upfront. They’d be like, ‘oh you? You want the head coaching job? You’re one funny Negro!’
“But that’s why proving racism for Black people in 2022 can be so frustrating,” he concluded. “Sometimes it feels like you’re the only person in a horror movie who actually knows what’s going on.”
