Friday on ABC’s The View, the show celebrated host Joy Behar’s birthday, by starting off with a special guest appearance by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, voiced by comedian Robert Smigel. The puppet dog has been a mainstay on Conan O’Brien’s late-night comedy shows for the past twenty years and has a penchant for brutally mocking his interviewers. So naturally the hosts’ liberal bias didn’t escape the puppet’s blunt jokes.
The short segment began with host Sara Haines revealing that the insult comedian was actually the “only” guest Behar specifically requested to be a guest on the show celebrating her birthday. Triumph started off with his usual crass bit of pretending to hump each host’s leg. At the cringes, Triumph joked, “What?I’m taking a little time to enjoy the view!” the puppet joked, ripping on The View’s tagline said at the end of every episode.
“Oh my God, Joy. Someone else is down there. Harvey Weinstein’s down here too!” he said to restrained laughter from the panel and awkward silence from the audience. “I’ll never work in this business again,” he joked.
Triumph then used that Weinstein joke to mock President Trump, saying: “Sexual harassment with a powerful man, the jokes are going to happen. You just weather it. In a couple of weeks it will blow over and before you know it you'll be President of the United States.” That joke was more up the liberal audience’s alley, who erupted in cheers and applause at the dig at Trump.
“Now I have to make fun of you,” he turned to Joy.
“Go ahead,” she responded.
“Joy, you do you look beautiful. You have a certain lunch lady who won the lottery look,” he mocked.
He stroked her face and said, “Look at this beautiful skin. Look how soft-- I can't believe how soft her skin still is. It's as soft as your interview with Hillary Clinton.”
Though the audience didn’t like that joke, Behar and the hosts took it in stride, laughing. Triumph then made a joke that hit both Behar and Trump at the same time:
You have so much going on, Joy. You're get better. You have that gas bag book about Donald Trump. Oh, Trump is going to hate your book so much once somebody final reads it to him. Let me get this straight: You hate Trump, but you also went to his wedding? I mean who are you Melania?
Just like the other dig at Trump, the audience loved it and clapped in response. But Triumph wasn’t done, he still had more jokes mocking the left in his arsenal:
“Bernie wanted to be here today,” Triumph said to Behar, who is a big fan of Bernie Sanders. But “unfortunately, he was out having his suit unpressed,” he joked.
“Where is that dog named Bernie? I want to stoop him. I want to do the same thing to the dog Bernie that the DNC did to Bernie,” he said, mocking the way the DNC actively tried to get Sanders out of the race to make room for Hillary Clinton. The panel and audience didn’t appreciate that joke either, making sounds of disapproval.
After making some jokes about Behar’s appearance and movie career, Triumph made one more political joke at her expense to end the segment:
“You're a New York icon, Joy. You're like a subway announcement. You're loud. We hear you every day, and you don't make any sense to people from the midwest,” he joked.
While Triumph is an equal-opportunity insult comic, that kind of humor attacking both the left and right is a rarity in 2017 American media. Triumph doesn’t engage with the self-protecting media very often, but when he does, the results are pretty hilarious. The last time Triumph appeared on a news network was during the DNC convention, after Clinton clinched the nomination. Chaos ensued, as the comic mocked the various CNN anchors. Months before that, he appeared on MSNBC, where he cracked jokes at the network’s lack of viewership.
