John Oliver has long had a bone to pick with Budweiser. The late-night host, who previously compared the product’s taste to “The Jolly Green Giant’s ejaculate,” tore into the company on Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight, criticizing its response to backlash over a social media partnership with TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney.
In the weeks after Mulvaney posted an innocuous ad for Bud Light—a beverage Oliver described as “the beer you’d give a child to drink to teach it a lesson” and “a beer that asks the question: Are we allowed to call cat urine beer?’”—many customers “on the right absolutely lost their shit over this, because Bud Light partnered with a trans woman,” Oliver explained. “There have been calls for boycotts, and this incredibly stupid video from Kid Rock.”
Oliver then mocked the footage, in which Rock can be seen shooting packs of purchased Bud Light with a rifle. “I don’t think there’s a more dangerous way to dispose of Bug Light other than, of course, drinking it,” Oliver quipped. “And second, not to gun shame Child Rock here, but you are 20 yards away from a target that’s bright, identifiable, and crucially stationary, and you are spraying bullets all over the place. Perhaps that is why it sure seems like you may have help there, because if you watch it slowed down, you’ll notice that three blasts that actually destroy the cases appear to be coming from the right.”
The host then targeted the “real nastiness” behind the backlash with “moral panic around trans rights” arriving amidst anti-LBTQ laws in various states, including bans on gender-affirming care for kids. “And maddeningly, Anheuser-Busch’s response to that ugliness has been to equivocate in the face of it,” Oliver continued. “Its CEO put out a statement that said, ‘We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.’ Which, sure. Though, again, not technically beer so much as it’s fizzy water swished around a dog’s mouth.”
He concluded the segment by playing a recent ad for Budweiser that emphasizes the unity its product brings, which Oliver called a “huge misfire.” He added, “When bigots are loudly announcing they don’t like your beer because they are bigots, that is an opportunity to say ‘Then our beer is not for you.’ But if you’re going to cozy up to them with platitudes, stock footage, and frankly, distractingly fuckable horses, why not at least really go for it?”
Basically, Oliver explained: “It’s pretty annoying to be both-sidesing something that when the two sides are: ‘I am trans’ and ‘That makes me so mad, I’m going to shoot $65 worth of nonrefundable beer.’”
Savannah Walsh
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