Late night hosts love nothing more than piling on fallen stars.
Think Lori Loughlin, the “Full House” alum who cheated her daughter’s way into college. Or any given Kanye West moment from his tumultuous 2020. Plugging into mainstream outrage is easy material. The jokes often write themselves. So when woke queen Chrissy Teigen got outed as a cyber mean girl you’d expect Team Late Night to pounce and/or seize.
“[Teigen] wouldn’t just publicly tweet about wanting me to take ‘a dirt nap’ but would privately DM me and tell me to kill myself. Things like, ‘I can’t wait for you to die,”” Teigen victim Courtney Stodden told The Daily Beast. about Teigen’s relentless bullying.
We’ve actually seen very little about Teigen’s fall from the usual late night suspects. Trevor Noah tackled TeigenGate this week, though, in a way that makes little sense on the surface.
The far-left host of “The Daily Show” awkwardly rallied behind Teigen, who did more than send vicious messages to troubled stars. She allegedly worked behind the scenes to ensure a designer wouldn’t work in the fashion industry again.
“I think we can all agree that Chrissy Teigen has been a particularly horrible person online,” Noah said.
So far, so obvious. He then wondered why she acted so cruelly in the first place.
“Because, let’s be real, Chrissy Teigen was far from the only a**hole on Twitter,” he said, adding Twitter “pushes people into being their most a**holish self …. roasting people, dunking on them, that’s how you get the likes, that’s how you get the retweets, it’s how you have ‘fun,’ It’s how you get to be part of the group.”
Noah suggested the social media platform, not Teigen, deserves the blame for her barbaric behavior. Twitter feasts on outrage, and venom, and that’s the problem here.
Not Teigen.
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Noah has a generic point about social media bringing out the worst in us, at times. Many people flex their Twitter accounts for far less nefarious purposes.
How many people boast millions and millions of followers like Teigen? Of that group, how many flex that clout to tell people to die and hurt their careers? That’s a pretty small number, most likely.
“I’m not saying every tweet has to be smiles and gumdrops,” Noah said. “We can still be humans, we can still have fun. But maybe just aim for that giant space between Chrissy Teigen hate tweets, and any John Legend song.”
Have punches ever been pulled in such fashion?
HuffPo lacked any outrage over Noah’s peculiar stance. Mic.com actively cheered Noah on, saying he had the “exact right take” on TeigenGate.
What Noah is pointing out is that perhaps Teigen isn’t an evil person — the internet makes it really easy to hurl insults you’d never in a million years say to another human in real life.
This reporter did a quick search on Mic for empathetic stories after Roseanne Barr got canceled for a single, awful Tweet.
No luck, alas.
Noah was less generous with Barr’s fall, too, even though he admits Twitter “pushes people into being their most a**holish self.”
Could Noah’s peculiar stance have anything to do with his own Twitter history? Some of the comedian’s less P.C. Twitter jokes “resurfaced” shortly after Comedy Central selected him to take over for Jon Stewart as “The Daily Show’s” faux anchor in 2015.
The comic slyly referenced that in his Teigen defense, saying, “Lord knows I’ve said things on Twitter that I wouldn’t say today.”
There’s a more likely reason, though.
Teigen is a powerful progressive voice. She’s anti-Trump, pro woke and is willing to flex her celebrity clout for the liberal cause du jour. In short, she’s a valuable asset for the Left, and Noah isn’t keen on having her discarded.
