John Mulaney Settles the ‘Weird’ Debate Over Political Name-Calling

Now more than ever, the political world needs the wisdom of John Mulaney’s smash hit 2012 stand-up special New in Town to make sense of the upcoming election — for instance, he and his Ice-T impression can explain to Matt Gaetz’ constituency what the word “pedophile” means.

The last eight years of conservative politics can be characterized by a drastic change in the rhetoric used by Republican leaders. During Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, the former president and current felon scored many viral moments among his supporters and detractors alike by spouting insults like “Crooked Hillary,” “bad hombres” and “nasty women,” and language used in political settings during Trump’s presidency only became more crass and infantile. Today, right-wing voters and leaders alike have a massive arsenal of insults that they lob at marginalized groups or left-leaning politicians, with terms like “DEI” and “groomers” taking the place of the slurs we all know they want to use instead.

However, the Democratic Party is starting to pick up on the new rules of engagement laid out by their opponents — though the left is still playing catchup at the name-calling game. As such, liberals have started small with their insults as a viral movement to call Trump and his cult of personality “weird” in tweets and Instagram posts has provoked an irate reaction from the right.

When a conservative troll tried to go viral by claiming that calling a right-winger “weird” is tantamount to using America’s most offensive slur, one Mulaney fan corrected them using their own words:

Now, to be clear, the original poster who claimed that “weird” is an unspeakable slur was likely just trying to get a rise out of the online left when he set that Mulaney fan up for the absolute perfect invocation of Mulaney’s New in Town. However, it’s a common enough occurrence for someone on the receiving end of a “weird,” a “Karen” or an “ok boomer” to claim that the internet’s favorite new phrase to describe the most annoying people in the world is equal in ugliness to the worst slur in American history, so Mulaney’s iconic take on the m-word versus the n-word remains hilariously applicable to the current discourse.

Also, it’s funny how it’s always the case that the people who won’t publicly say the n-word while trying to compare it to whatever insult targets them are the same ones who definitely say it in private.