Chuck Lorre, the 73-year-old sitcom mogul behind Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, used a charity awards speech in Los Angeles to call President Donald Trump “that bloated orange piece of s— in the White House” and to describe First Lady Melania Trump as “a surgically-enhanced, cold-hearted Yugoslavian escort who clearly hates her husband.” The remarks came Saturday night at Project Angel Food’s Angel Awards, where Lorre accepted a founders award for his donations to the meal-delivery charity. He also used the speech to take shots at Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The setting made his vulgar display stranger still. Project Angel Food prepares and delivers medically tailored meals to people battling critical and life-threatening illnesses, and its Los Angeles campus now carries Lorre’s name after his giving helped fund a $55.5 million kitchen and campus. His daughter, Nikki Lorre, introduced him at the event, telling the crowd his career was originally driven by making sure his kids had health insurance. Audience members included Warner Bros. executives, his UTA agent Jay Sures, and people involved with his current shows.
Lorre opened with a bit of throat-clearing about the pressure of being funny, telling the crowd, “Your laughter or lack thereof becomes inextricably tied up with my self-esteem.” Then he got to the point. “Sure, I’d love to stand here and talk about my deep yearning for a more compassionate government, one that prioritizes the health and welfare of its citizens. But the burden of my profession demands that I take this opportunity to say a few words about that bloated orange piece of s— in the White House,” he said.
As The Hollywood Reporter reported, the audience erupted in laughter, and Lorre surveyed the crowd. “OK, I do have the right audience,” he said. From there he explained that, as a comedy writer, “I have no choice but to explain how I wake up every morning to turn on CNN to see if the President of the United States had a heart attack while straining to take a dump.”
He then pivoted to Melania, folding the smear into a fake fundraising pitch. “I’d love to encourage you to pull out your wallets and contribute to this amazing organization, but my need to cause laughter forces me to question how a country can embrace a smart, educated, warm, funny first lady like Michelle Obama and somehow be OK with a surgically-enhanced, cold-hearted Yugoslavian escort who clearly hates her husband,” Lorre said.
Kennedy was next. Lorre said he wanted the Democratic National Committee to “run from the suicidal insanity of the far-left woke culture” and instead court what he called the “common sense middle ground” of working-class America. He then dropped into a gravelly imitation of the HHS secretary to deliver the line that those same hard workers “will likely die of measles because Bobby Kennedy told them not to get vaccinated.” “I actually practiced that,” Lorre told the audience.
Earlier in the speech, Lorre worked in a jab at Warner Bros., quipping that the studio only “stole a little money” from him over the years while standing feet from its top television executives. He also plugged his memoir, “Sitcom”, saying, “If you happen to be mentioned in the book and you take issue with my recall of events, I recommend you write your own f—ing book.” Lorre closed with a rewrite of the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to no longer give a s— about all the stupid people in this country, the courage to say Donald Trump is a Russian asset who traded teenagers with Jeffrey Epstein, and the wisdom to end on a cheap laugh,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
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Users on social media didn’t think his quips were as funny as the insider Hollywood crowd seemed to, with one user saying, “This guy hasn’t been relevant since big bang theory ended.” Another user said, “Comedy writer says nothing funny. Stick to your niche.” A third went after the whole crowd, saying, “Angry. Pathetic. Uncivilized. Yep. That’s Hollywood.” One person summed up what many were thinking online, saying, “So many plain stupid GenX and boomer liberals. No wonder this world is such a mess!”
Featured image credit: Angela George, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons