There’s an old adage that you shouldn’t read your press, you should just weigh it and for the CFL, going viral weighs 20 pounds of poop.
Late night talk show host Stephen Colbert does a bit on his show called “Meanwhile,” which he describes as the “ransom note of news.” And the No. 2 item on Friday night? Poop Johnson.
“Meanwhile in sports news, the Canadian Football League has announced – and let me pause right there, first of all there is a Canadian Football League and the cheerleaders are here tonight evidently – well they’ve been up to something. Specifically, that a defensive tackle with the actual name Poop Johnson has signed to play with the Toronto Argonauts. And where did Poop get his nickname? The answer will make you say, ‘ yeah that makes sense.’ You see a defensive tackle, needs to stay heavy and when asked about his weight by sports reporters, Johnson once said ‘he can weigh anywhere between 280 to 300 pounds depending on the day.’ How? ‘I guess because I poop so much.'”
“Twenty pounds! That’s what you want on your defensive line, you want a guy who can line up look his opponent in the eye and say ‘I crap three babies a day.'”
Colbert wasn’t the only media outlet to try and, uh, squeeze a couple of laughs out of Poop Johnson. The website Deadspin, which writes about both poop and Poop with, uh, regularity also did another riff after his signing.
But Colbert is another thing altogether: he currently has the highest-rated late night talk show, beating both Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel. The clip that includes the Poop joke had almost 400,000 views on YouTube by Sunday afternoon and was No. 11 on the trending list.
We can debate the relative merits of this kind of exposure – does the eyeballs the league gets from having its logo in front of millions of viewers outweigh that Colbert is taking a couple of shots at the CFL – but one thing is for sure: ‘I crap three babies a day’ is some funny… shit.
