Ethan Coen ‘thanks’ Jimmy Fallon for Donald Trump’s Tonight Show visit
By Hector Cruz
Director Ethan Coen parodies Jimmy Fallon’s “Thank You Notes” to blame the Tonight Show host and other individuals for helping to elect Donald Trump.
Like many other Hollywood figures, filmmaker Ethan Coen was very angry about Donald Trump winning the presidential election last week, which he expressed in an essay for The New York Times where he called out several people for contributing to the Republican’s victory, including third-party voters, James Comey, Anthony Weiner, and Jimmy Fallon, who he accused of humanizing Trump.
The director used Fallon’s popular Tonight Show segment “Thank You Notes” to create the list, also sarcastically expressing his gratitude for the Electoral College, which handed Trump the win despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, and media figures like CBS president Les Moonves, who once said that Trump “may not be good for America, but he’s damn good for CBS.”
“How did you manage to shine a nonthreatening light on someone who alarms so many women, frightens so many undocumented families and slurs so many minorities?” he asked of Fallon, who was fifth on the list. “Can’t have been easy! Thanks!”
The Tonight Show host was widely criticized by folks on the left for taking it easy on Trump during a recent interview on the NBC program where he mussed the candidate’s hair and failed to ask him any hard-hitting questions. While fellow late-night host Samantha Bee was critical of the move, others such as Fallon’s former SNL colleague Tina Fey and The Late Show host Stephen Colbert came to the comedian’s defense.
“Maybe now you could have the Grand Wizard on your show: He leans his head to you, you slip his hood off and ruffle his hair. Could be a cute bit!” Coen continued in his message directed at Fallon.
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Topping his “2016 Election Thank You Notes” op-ed piece were Jill Stein voters. Coen wrote:
"“You helped elect a man who pledges that he will, in his first hundred days, cancel contributions to United Nations programs to fight climate change. If your vote for Ms. Stein did not end up advancing your green agenda, it did allow you to feel morally superior to all the compromising schmoes who voted for Hillary Clinton. And your feelings about your vote are more important than the consequences of your vote. So — thank you!”"
He followed by giving Gary Johnson supporters a shout out by thanking them for helping to elect “someone who admires the governance of Vladimir Putin,” and ribbed Johnson himself for not knowing where Aleppo is. Also making the list were James Comey for his “publicity coup” that “may have affected the outcome of the election,” Anthony Weiner, who “also found a surprising way to contribute,” and the media for creating a false equivalency between the two candidates.
Coen explained: “Thank you for preserving reportorial balance. You balanced Donald Trump’s proposal that the military execute the innocent families of terrorists against Hillary’s emails. You balanced pot-stirring racist lies about President Obama’s birth against Hillary’s emails.”
One person he purposely left off the list was Clinton, noting that, “Misogyny may have magnified her failings so as to show them balancing the outsized failings of her opponent — and that might not be her fault. But she fought to the very limits of her ability to deny us Tuesday night’s surprise, so I do not thank her.”
Next: Tina Fey defends Jimmy Fallon’s Donald Trump Tonight Show interview
Lastly, the Fargo director thanked the American electorate for their important contribution, “Because in the end, we all did it together. We did it! We really did it!”