the kicker

Someone Should Give Bill O’Reilly His Own Show

But what on earth would they call it?
September 23, 2008

This morning, Fox personality and self-impersonator Bill O’Reilly went on Good Morning America to peddle his eighth book, which goes on sale today. Modestly titled A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity, the memoir traces O’Reilly’s modest Levittown beginnings and the etiology of the face that launched a thousand jokes. Or, as he told GMA’s Robin Roberts, the book is “kind of like going into Frankenstein’s laboratory – how’d that monster actually rise from the slab?!” Gooood question.

His ballyhooing about the book—wanting to sue the nun who taught him in third grade for smacking him with a ruler, wanting to smack everyone who wants to know what happened to that cute little boy on the cover (“I don’t want to hear it anymore, ladies and gentlemen. I’m nine, all right? Now I’m eighty!”)—quickly transitioned into something grander, an O’Reillian philosophy of life: “I believe that overcoming fear is the key to a useful and honorable life.”

This pugilistically innovative life method explains how America has gotten through everything ever, how it will get through this now, and how Robin Roberts got through cancer. (Chemo? Overrated.). Roberts, bored, flustered, or transported by the lecture, decided to wrap up by saying “Bill O’Reilly. You should really have your own show – oh, that’s right! You already have your own show!”

“I do have my own show, Robin,” the Philosopher King groused. Indeed.

Julia Ioffe is a freelance writer based in New York City.