BLAME ME
An ode to Colbert.
As of this writing, a bunch of right-wing douchebags have long come out with their laughably disingenuous apologies for supporting Trump. Anyone who isn’t a complete and total piece of shit knows that Trump is, and has always been, cut from the same piece of shit-stained cloth. He doesn’t give a single fuck about anything but himself as he continues to actively destroy this country as we know it. And it’s all my fault. Here’s why!
Back in regular shitty times, before Trump ran for prez, watching sports was simply a normal diversion, and not the sanity-saving distraction from the non-stop, infuriatingly depressing, fascism-filled miasma that is our daily social media news feeds. I live in New York, and went to a New York Rangers hockey game at Madison Square Garden with a famous pal who had incredible seats behind one of the goals. The Rangers were playing the Washington Capitals, featuring star Russian player and goal scoring machine Alexander Ovechkin. Our seats were about ten rows back and centered behind the goalie. Pretty great. But they were nestled deeper into the middle of the row, and about a dozen people had to stand up so we could get there.
One of those people was Donald Trump.
At this point, he hasn’t announced that he’s running for president. He’s just “The Donald”: New York’s preeminent charlatan businessman/reality TV star and garden variety racist douchebag. My buddy and I began the very uncomfortable sideways step-walk past our rowmates. I look up ahead and was stunned to see this total fucking cock looming about twenty feet away, his mere presence a colossal, joy-sucking bummer. We were going to have to shuffle past him to get to our seats.
His shoulders appeared hunched under the weight of his sheer misery. I sidled past, my face maybe a foot from that stupid fucking face of his, his mouth turned down into his ever-present wittle baby fwown. We pass him without issue, find our seats a little farther down, and watch the first period. I sit there fantasizing about a once-in-a-lifetime slap shot from Ovechkin, the footage in my mind cutting to slo-mo as the puck breaks through the protective plexiglass along the boards, lasering in on Trump and “Hey you! I know you, I know you!”-ing him right in the Adam’s apple.
The entire scene is scored by the 100% real song “No Cowards Play Hockey”:
“Does the Ice Brotherhood fight hard?” is going to be my new “Does a bear shit in the woods?” The bouncing hammer and sickle is what you follow along with the song. You’ll see if/when you watch the video, and I highly recommend you do. I also recommend you check out the other songs by its composer, Aleksandra Pakhmutova.
I only found out about the song because I did a search for “Russian symphony hockey”, hoping to stumble across something that sounded super dramatic and super Russian. This was (no exaggeration) a million time better. Slo-mo imagery of a Russian ice skating dynamo’s slap shot finding the throat of a draft dodging American pussy? Scored by a blunt song about pussies?? Written by a woman, no less???
The sweet free seats we sat in also got us access to some delicious free food in an area for designated ticket holders. We ate there before the game, and made our way back after the first period. No sign of Trump, thankfully. After sitting for a bite and a beer, we grabbed some snacks and headed back to our seats.
There’s still time before the second period starts, so our row is only about half full. As we make our way towards the seats, I look for Trump, hoping that he just made a cursory, performative appearance at the game and then went home to do what he’d rather have been doing anyway: masturbate to an old, oft-played DVD of hockey fights.
But there he was, starting to stand up to let us pass. Still wearing that stupid fwown on that stupid fucking face. Only this time, a new accessory had been added to his overall getup: a teeny, tiny, vanilla soft serve ice cream cone, clutched in his already-withering, now-newsworthy/bruise-worthy right hand.
If he weren’t such a complete and utter scumbag, this could have been a disarmingly engaging sight. “Aww, would ya look at that. The big bad real estate tycoon is just an innocent kid at heart that loves ice cream as much as he hates black people. Simply adorable!” He could have smiled and lapped playfully at the cone, spilling a little on his antiseptic Gordon Gecko-esque overcoat, and endearingly laughed the whole thing off. This simple act would have exuded a vulnerable masculinity with such steadfast confidence, that every MAGA homophobe in attendance would have been eager beaverly shoving each other out of the way to be first in line to bend at not one but two knees!
But he was holding the cone in such a rigid way that was so incredibly awkward, so completely unnatural, that it looked and felt like something he had either never done before, or had lost a bet, with the loser having to:
-Go to a Rangers game.
-Get an ice cream between periods but don’t eat it.
-Stand there holding it awkwardly and look like a miserable fucking asshole.
And he held it right in front of his mouth. Elbow jammed tightly into his side, bent at approximately a 45 degree angle. The swirl of processed ice cream was in a perfect spot for licking, but the tongue never emerged from between the two mushy earthworms he has for lips, thank fucking GOD.
As we approached, most people that have at least some sense of proper social cues would have, at the very least, turned their body slightly as someone else passed, so as not to accidentally let the ice cream get on the other person as they brushed past.
NOT THIS GRADE-A FUCKFACE. There is, of course, the obvious list of infuriating bullshit about this real-life asshole: the sociopathic narcissism; the indignant refusal to apologize to the “Central Park 5”; the first president in over a century to not have a dog or pet; the phony Christian who can’t quote a single passage of scripture and cleared out homeless people from in front of a church so he could do a photo op with an upside down bible; the sexual assault; the tens of thousands of times he appears in the Epstein files. The list goes on and on.
I’ve quoted this before on social media, but every time I hear Trump open his stupid fucking mouth, it makes me think about one of my all-time favorite scenes from one of my all-time favorite movies, Broadcast News.
During a round of brutal layoffs in the TV news department, network exec Paul Moore (played by longtime radio and TV political correspondent-turned-actor Peter Hackes) emerges from his office with a just-fired older news employee named Martin Klein (played by Robert Katims). The exchange:
MARTIN KLEIN
“You know…I’m just old enough to be flattered by the term “early retirement”.
PAUL MOORE
“That’s wonderful. What a lovely line.
It’s a perfectly written line, delivered perfectly by Katims.
It seems worth a reminder here that in response to most of Trump’s despicably racist and/or deeply inflammatory tweets and re-tweets - and in direct response to a comedian/total fucking douchebag calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” - JD “Dipshit The Sycophantic Lacky” Vance said “We are not going to restore the greatness of American civilization if we get offended at every little thing…let’s have a sense of humor....can we all just take a chill pill and take a joke from time to time?”
It doesn’t take much more than a conscience and a pulse to know that most of what comes out of that phony hillbilly’s mouth is hypocritical bullshit. But on this one, I couldn’t agree more!
Back to the hockey game. As I slowly approached Trump, every comedy instinct I had told me to pretend to trip and just launch myself at him with every ounce of force I could muster. As I crashed into him, I’d simultaneously shove that soft serve ice cream right into that stupid fucking face just as hard as I could, both of us going down in a heap. Really getting the most bang for my goof buck.
I did not do that, of course. No doubt I would have been kicked out, and probably arrested. I was with a famous person. I was also doing Parks and Rec at the time, and once it became clear who I was, I doubt that anyone would have believed it was an accident. Not to mention the ramifications for my pal. I was his guest. There would be no rink-side ice cream face-mashing that night.
We passed Trump without incident. We sat in our seats, watched the game, and I went home. A few years later he became president. Among other things, he completely mishandled a pandemic and incited a riot on the nation’s capital. A few years after that, he became president again. It’s an infuriatingly moronic time.
During his first term, I kept fantasizing about what would have happened if I actually had the guts to shove that ice cream into that stupid fucking face. There probably would have been an audible gasp from the crowd. People would have begun standing and looking over, starting to realize what happened. There was Donald Trump. Soft serve smeared all over his stupid fucking face. Next to him a famous actor. Next to the famous actor, some other guy. Within moments, murmurs of recognition would have started rippling throughout The World’s Most Famous Arena. “Oh, shit, that’s Jeremy Jamm!!!!”
Security would have shown up. We would have been thrown out. No doubt Trump would have made a point to find out who the loser buddy of the famous guy was and had me killed.
But it would have been worth it. No longer feeling impervious to this kind of comedy attack, he’d become a paranoid recluse, too afraid of making any more public appearances for fear of potential copy cat attacks from other people whose mission was to very publicly and very aggressively make fools out of scumbags. He never would have run in 2016, and I would have been a hero to my children. A hero to the country. A hero to the world.
Cosmically, at least, because obviously none of this truly infuriating bullshit had happened yet. It’d just have been a spectacle at a hockey game that maybe costs me a friendship, a career, or my life. Maybe all of the above. Maybe none of those things.
So now what? Do we all keep angrily posting on social media? Keep coming up with clever responses and zinger jokes about how Trump’s a pedophile? Protesting every few months and then going home? Do we keep indulging smug douchebags like Scott Jennings on news shows?? I don’t know. I stopped posting constant, angry shit on social media (maybe you muted me!) because I felt like I was screaming into an echo chamber. Lots of friends feel similarly helpless as we all watch all this deeply upsetting shit unfold relentlessly.
There’s obviously a lot of people doing truly incredible, truly important work out there. I am thankful for people like Robby Roadsteamer making life annoying as hell for MAGA and ICE. I am thankful for people like Elizabeth Booker Houston and Jolly Good Ginger. I am thankful for the activism of Climate Defiance. But is it all actually moving the needle? I want to believe so, but Trump and all these other assholes obviously don’t give a single shit.
For me, the only question worth asking at this point is for the suddenly enlightened, disgruntled MAGA. People like the newly minted “possible domestic terrorist” Tucker Carlson. You wanted him, you got him. And now you don’t want him anymore. So the question is simply “What the fuck are you going to do about it??” Are you all going to continue with the complaining and the bullshit mea culpas on your podcasts? Or does one of you actually have the guts shove a proverbial ice cream in Trump’s stupid fucking face and put us all out of our collective misery!!!
Jon Glaser Loves Gear premiered in late October 2016, and summarily got swallowed up by the 2016 election, as well as the Chicago Cubs winning their first World Series in over 108 years. I went on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote the show on October 26. Abbi Jacobson was the lead guest.
A couple weeks later, Trump was elected. I had a photo shoot the next day for Tru TV/Gear. This bummer trifecta of bullshit awaited me in my dressing room.
One of the fun parts of having a show is seeing the billboards, and also the subway ads since I live in New York. It’s especially fun when they get defaced. It feels like a true New York rite of passage. For context, the originals for Season 1 and 2:
And the hilariously defiled:
Top left is from Season 1/ Fall 2016, and the other three are from Season 2, Winter 2018. I got to go on Colbert again to promote the show. This time I put on a more respectable outfit.
During Trump’s first presidency, I told the hockey story a few times live on stage. During my first appearance on Colbert, I also told the story. Almost 10 years later, one of the smartest, funniest people you’ll ever meet in your life - who I had the good fortune of understudying at Second City in Chicago; who I worked with at The Dana Carvey Show (my first big job out of Second City); and who can actually quote scripture - was forced out of a job. Anyone that isn’t beholden to Trump’s butthole knows that the whole thing is total bullshit.
Congrats on a great run in late night, Stephen. You deserved better. We all do. And it’s all because I was a chicken shit at a hockey game. Sorry, everyone.
Love this and also damn you
I wish I had been your your famous friend with the sweet tickets that night…I would’ve pushed you into that fat fucking piece of dog shit!!