By Variety | Created at 2024-11-14 02:17:16 | Updated at 2024-11-21 13:07:56
1 week ago
Dick Van Dyke made a grim joke after the election, implying that he would rather be dead than live through another four years under Donald Trump.
The Hollywood legend, who turns 99 next month, was approached in a paparazzi video taken Tuesday (via Daily Mail) and asked, “Does the future look bright for America?”
“I hope you’re right,” Van Dyke said, before he was asked whether he thinks Trump “is capable of making America great again.”
“Fortunately, I won’t be around to experience the four years,” Van Dyke quipped.
A day before the election, the “Mary Poppins” and “Bye Bye Birdie” star posted a video online endorsing Kamala Harris for president. In the video, he read a speech that he delivered at a 1964 civil rights event alongside Martin Luther King Jr.
“Hatred is not the norm. Prejudice is not the norm. Suspicion, dislike, jealousy, scapegoating, none of those are the transcendent facet of the human personality. They’re diseases. They are. They cancers of the soul,” Van Dyke read, in part.
He continued, “There will be moments of violence and expressions of hatred and [an] ugly echo of intolerance, but these are the clinging vestiges of a decayed past, not the harbingers of the better, cleaner future. To those who tell us the inequality of the human animal is a necessary evil, we must respond by simply saying that first, it is evil, but not necessary.”
At the end of the video, Van Dyke said, “1964 — a lot’s happened. Not so much as Martin Luther dreamed of, but it’s a start. Thank you, and God bless.”
Van Dyke supported Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential primary and spoke at one of the senator’s campaign events. Earlier this year, he publicly backed Joe Biden before the president dropped out of the race. Van Dyke told The Hollywood Reporter in June that he believed Donald Trump is “disturbed,” in part because he’s “never seen him laugh.”
