John Oliver's Mike Pence-trolling book about a gay rabbit is actually pretty lame

Slate

The Last Week Tonight host's stunt doesn't make sense, says Benjamin Frisch of Oliver's Marlon Bundo book. "What about this children’s book makes it ripe for a gay parody?" he says, adding that "the primary reason is because gay stuff is the way we troll Mike Pence now. It’s predictable, it’s lazy, and the joke is starting to sour." Despite Oliver's "fluffy victory lap" on Ellen and Seth Meyers this week, Frisch says the book actually fails at skewering Mike Pence -- in fact, the family has turned it into positive press for themselves. "The story of the book is rote and uninteresting, because it’s not a book about a story," says Frisch. "It’s a story about a book: about how heroic comedy liberals served a truly legendary dunk—your rabbit is gay, dude!—in order to remind us that Mike Pence is annoyed by gay people. As if we gay people needed reminding...  If our only recourse against bigotry is using gayness as a Styrofoam cudgel to knock down a Pence-shaped piñata, perhaps we need to revisit our tactics."