Last month, rumours leaked that the creators of the 2006 film Idiocracy were teaming up with actor Terry Crews to make anti-Trump TV commercials. But now those rumours have been put to rest, and Crews has given us a hint about why. It seems that Mike Judge, the director of Idiocracy, might be afraid of offending fans of Donald Trump.
“It was killed,” Terry Crews told Business Insider yesterday during a press junket for an unrelated project. “Etan Cohen [the writer of Idiocracy] went out and said we were making anti-Trump ads, but we weren’t. I’m not anti-Trump, I’m not anti-Hillary. I’m not pro anybody.”
Crews played the flamboyant and idiotic US President Camacho in Idiocracy, which is set in a futuristic world of morons who have evolved to care more about entertainment and junk food than education and politics.
“It was going to be funny. But when you make it an anti-Trump ad what’s funny about that? Now you killed the comedy,” Crews told Business Insider. Crews believes that when you “pick a side” it’s “not funny anymore.”
And it’s not just Crews who’s backpedaling about the anti-Trump ads. He says that Idiocracy director Mike Judge (creator of shows like King of the Hill and HBO’s Silicon Valley) wanted to do something for the election, (if they were going to do anything at all), that would skewer everyone involved.
“Dude, I don’t know what possessed [Cohen] to call them anti-Trump ads because that’s not what they were,” Crews recounted Judge saying about the hypothetical ad campaign.
Politically, if you can judge a person by their art, Mike Judge seems to be a pretty Bill Hicksian-type Libertarian. So it makes sense that he would align himself with the South Park school of fuck-em-all. But this move by both Crews and Judge seems more calculated to simply not offend half of the US population, now that most conservatives have simply stepped into line and gotten behind Donald Trump, a literal fascist who has supported policies no less extreme than banning all people of a given religion from entering our country.
Because it’s such an impotent garbage philosophy, you can bet there are still plenty of people out there who think that Idiocracy perfectly aligns with their specific worldview. That’s kind of the genius of Idiocracy. And precisely what makes it so dangerous. But I guess you gotta hear both sides. You don’t want to “kill the comedy.” [Business Insider]