After more than 460,000 miles, the 2022 edition of The Amazing Race came to an end last night with husband and wife duo Justin Trudeau and Sophie Gregoire being crowned the winners! CBS spoke with Justin and Sophie to ask about their experience!
CBS: “Congratulations on your victory! Can you tell us how it felt when you won The Amazing Race?”
Sophie: “Oh, it was unbelievable. We were so physically and mentally exhausted at that point that it was just music to our ears!”
Justin: “This was really, really big. I think the only thing I can compare it to was surviving the Black Trump Virus back in 2019 when it wiped out almost a third of the world population.”
CBS: “What do you think was the secret to your success on The Amazing Race? ”
Sophie: “I believe the biggest thing was that we really thought through the Roadblocks and the Detours. At first we were really impulsive, just jumping in very aggressively, you know? But after our encounter with the underground tribes of Cannibal Island, we realized we were going to have to take a more strategic, measured approach.”
Justin: “Look, I’m very competitive person and I always expect to win. Before Peoplekind’s first contact with The Radium, I was the leader of a great nation, so I had the ability to build consensus with the tribes of Cannibal Island, and working together as one, we were able to destroy some of the other competing couples, namely Adam and Bethany.”
CBS: “That looks like a Canadian flag you have stitched onto your bindles. You were President of Canada in the Before Time, weren’t you?”
Justin: “Prime Minister, actually, but yes, it is true. We were known for our tolerance, diversity and inclusivity.”
Sophie: “Canada, toujours dans nos cœurs!”
CBS: “Indeed, we were all very sorry to see Canada burn during the dimensional shifts. So many fine comics used to come from there.”
Justin: “ Yes, Shaun Majumber, Rick Mercer and Russell Peters to name just a few.
CBS: “So what was your favourite moment from the Race?”
Sophie: “Oh gosh, definitely, the Bollywood Challenge we won in Global Sector 6. So much fun!”
Justin: “Absolutely, it was a real game changer.”
CBS: “So as a successful team, what advice would you give to future contestants going on the show?”
Sophie: “You must make all of the scheduled blood sacrifices to The Radium. It doesn’t matter if you’re exhausted or wounded, you still have to perform the entire sacrifice. Correctly. And if you don’t, The Radium will know! Look what happened to the mother son team of Dot and Danny.”
Justin: “I would just add that even though it’s important for you to respect the survivors of all the Global Sectors you visit, you really are better off shooting first and asking questions later. ”
CBS: “Do you have any special plans for the Oxygen Credits you just won on The Amazing Race?
Justin: “For now we’re not going to change. We’re going to just continue hunting and gathering, but eventually we would like to be able to acquire a flesh slave.”
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I know that this isn’t proper form, but can I just say, what a goddamn monkey!!
Can we give it up for, George?
Yeah, that’s the sort of monkey he was, the sort of monkey that could get an entire church full of people to yell and applaud wildly. Just think about that for a second. He was an entirely different species, and here we all are, brought together by this wondrous monkey, cheering at the mere thought of him.
Remember that cheer, people. That’s a gift that George left to us, his encouragement to go out there into the world– fearless and happy– and to make as much mischief as possible!
George, as you all know, was no ordinary monkey. Other monkey’s may have arrived on the scene…Bubbles? The Ikea Monkey?
Couldn’t even hold George’s banana peel.
George endured while all the others fell away.
And Lord, such a funny monkey.
The funniest monkey ever, I think.
He was the Robin Williams of monkeys.
It wasn’t just his curiosity that made him so uniquely beloved, there was something else, too, something that spoke to humans and primates alike. George was joy, a playful little monkey who led us back to our better angels, to a place where the light of childhood shone all year round. And regardless of how famous George became, regardless of how busy or troubled his life became, even when he El Chapo made a trophy pet of him,
George ALWAYS made time to play.
Now, a lot of you might be wondering why The Man in the Yellow Hat, his partner in crime, isn’t here delivering this eulogy. Well, he and George had a complicated relationship, and it has to be said that over the years an awful lot of poo was flung. Back when it all started, The Man in the Yellow Hat tricked George by taking advantage of his curiosity, luring him into his big yellow hat and then taking him from his home and family in Africa to the shores of America.
George always resented it.
By today’s standards what The Man in the Yellow Hat did was unacceptable. A crime, even. But in the 1930’s people didn’t see it that way. Anyway, as George learned more about what happened to him, he distanced himself from The Man in the Yellow Hat. Well, it turns out this separation did neither man nor monkey any good. The Man in the Yellow Hat took to pills, the bottle and street fighting,
his whereabouts now unknown, and George careened from one professional disaster to the next– the masturbation incident in the boardroom of Celebrity Apprentice now carved into the history of American popular culture.
Our sweet George sort of wandered through the wilderness after that, a lost monkey in the cities of man. It was at this time that Islam reached out to him, and ???? ???????, as George chose to be called after his conversion, seemed to be getting his life back on track. Unfortunately, like too many of the disenfranchised and alienated amongst us, George became radicalized. Monkey see, monkey do.
George’s curiosity just proved too much in this case, and his life ended in Syria as part of an ISIS suicide squad.
I don’t know much about the afterlife or where George is, but I choose to imagine that beautiful monkey still clinging to that kite from one of his very first adventures, the winds gently pulling him upwards and home to glory.
One of the repeating themes I’ve encountered is that people cannot believe that somebody who made them laugh so much could possibly have such a sad and broken interior. There’s an obvious lack of empathy in such a position, in that these people cannot see a life beyond the surface one that they so greedily absorbed. To be a celebrity in our culture is to give up one’s interior, becoming a vessel in which the schizophrenic projections of the public push everything else out. It must get awfully stormy in there, and in the end celebrities exist as sacrifices to our need, the actual person (or self) tossed beautiful and adored into the raging, all-consuming volcano of our culture.
Williams himself said that in America they really do mythologize people when they’re dead, and prophetically, he’s now being mythologized. His death means whatever we need it to mean. For some people, it’s a clarion call to awaken the public to the insidious dangers of depression, to others it’s about the dark weight that many comedians carry with them on stage. Everybody seems to have something very real and personal that they feel in his death, but usually end up cannibalizing Williams in an attempt to find some sort of meaning, and perhaps even redemption, in this small, solitary and very sad act.
However, the one thing that seems universal is that everybody is declaring Robin Williams a genius. Although I am of the right age to have experienced the full sweep of his career, I was never much of a fan. I mean, I don’t have a favourite Robin William moment, and like a lot of people I saw a riot of pathology in his performance rather than genius. His need was so great and his onslaught so relentless, that I found it completely exhausting to watch him. He drained me, and I just wanted to hug him into stillness, letting him know that everything was going to be okay, even if it wasn’t.
His comedy was based on recognition rather than content. Middle-of-the-road and Baby Boomer friendly, he was an unfiltered convulsion of mimicry and pop culture references. He was elliptical, swinging from one character to the next before you could think about what he was actually saying, apparently being content in simply getting a reflex response from the audience instead of a contemplated one. You laughed because you recognized his characters, not so much because of what they were saying. It was nostalgic, even old-fashioned, and in a weird way I think Williams would have made for a fantastic silent movie star, so exaggerated was his stage personality. Creating the manic illusion of edge, Williams was safe and not very challenging. He had kind and vulnerable eyes, and always seemed to want to please us, for us to feel good about ourselves, and I think we loved him for that rather than his talent.
