Larry Wilmore Wants To Smother Donald Trump With Scalia’s Pillow [Video]
Comedy Central host Larry Wilmore joked, if it can be called that, that he would be willing to “literally” suffocate Donald Trump with the pillow that was found over the face of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In the run-up to Super Tuesday, Wilmore described this “comedic” murder fantasy on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, the Monday-through-Thursday offering which replaced Stephen Colbert’s program.
The host was alluding to the conspiracy theories that have emerged following the recent death of the highly respected Justice Scalia, a Reagan appointee who served on the Supreme Court for about 30 years, in his room at a Texas hunting resort.
Larry Wilmore 'fantasizes' about killing Donald Trump with Antonin Scalia's pillow https://t.co/t3kfYUl3nE
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) March 1, 2016
An outspoken Trump foe, Wilmore was riffing on the Oscars and the whole Donald Trump-David Duke disavowal controversy along with the the fact that the GOP frontrunner receives an inordinate amount of media coverage (a.k.a. oxygen) when he quipped the following — along with a demonstration — to raucous audience laughter and cheering.
“Anyway, since we’re talking about bigotry, we have to mention Donald Trump. Sorry everyone. I know. I don’t want to give him any more oxygen. That’s not a euphemism, by the way. I mean it literally. Somebody get me the pillow they used to kill Scalia and I’ll do it, okay — I’ll do it…I could get in trouble for that…I just realized that.”
See the clip here.
So is Trump's rhetoric more or less irresponsible than Wilmores?https://t.co/eu9EHn2S6w via @deadline
— Harvey_Mallory (@APaladin35) March 2, 2016
Wilmore’s attempt at humor may be an effort to generate ratings or buzz for his struggling show. According to Ad Week, Wilmore’s program on Comedy Central has lost about 50 percent of its audience in the two years after it replaced The Colbert Report starting in January 2015.
“The Colbert Report averaged 1.3 million total viewers in February 2014, according to Nielsen. A year later, Wilmore’s recently launched Nightly Show was holding a respectable average of 812,000 viewers. Moving forward another year to this month, Wilmore averaged 580,000 total viewers each night in the first week of February. In other words, Wilmore’s audience is 55 percent lower than Colbert’s was in the same time slot and 29 percent lower than Wilmore was attracting a year ago.”
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In a Reddit AMA last month, Larry Wilmore disclosed that “I choose what I want to talk about, and I have the final word on everything in the script, for better or for worse.” That being the case, he appears to be responsible, rather than a producer entering words into a teleprompter, for the Donald Trump suffocation bit.
He added that “One of the missions of the show when we started was to be an answer to The Daily Show and focus on race, class, and gender.”
As far as his political leanings, Wilmore explained that “I like Bernie Sanders a lot personally. I haven’t made up my mind who I would vote for. There’s no one on the right who I could see voting for right now.”
Timothy Noah, Jon Stewart’s replacement on The Daily Show, has also encountered a significant Comedy Central ratings shortfall as compared to his predecessor.
Colbert replaced David Letterman on CBS and he too has experienced ratings issues, slipping into third place behind NBC and ABC counterparts Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel.
Wilmore began appearing on The Daily Show in 2006, where he was designated the “senior black correspondent.”
Do you think that Larry Wilmore’s “pillow talk” about Donald Trump is funny?
Do you think there would be more of an outcry if Larry Wilmore was talking about an imaginary killing of a politician other than Donald Trump, particularly a Democrat?
[Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP]
