If you follow football, you know all about the current dumpster fire occurring in Pittsburgh right now. As a patriots fan, I fucking love it. What started out as a possible Super Bowl contending team didn’t even make the playoffs this year, and it seems as if their problems are far from over. Mike Tomlin’s days appear to be numbered as head coach, and the locker room has essentially devolved into a scene from Mean Girls. Everybody was aware of the dispute with star running back Leveon Bell, who is likely leaving the team after sitting out the year over contract disputes, forfeitting $14.5 million in the process. Well now the future of another pittsburgh star is in jeopardy. Wide receiver Antonio Brown did not play last week, but now it’s been confirmed that he was benched as punishment for sitting out of practice all week. This was due to an alleged dispute with quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, so to sum it up, the entire Steelers roster  is trying to out-diva eachother. As funny as this is, it got a whole lot funnier last night. During the premiere of Fox’s new show The Masked Singer, it was revealed that Antonio Brown was the contestant wearing a hippo costume.

For the record, I didn’t watch the premiere of The Masked Singer. I can’t believe I missed it, but I was busy doing literally anything else. The premise of the show (Atleast I think) is that celebrities put on masks, sing a song, and judges try to guess who they are. I think it’s safe to say that the entertainment industry, and I use the word entertainment loosely, is scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point. Anyway, a contestant came out wearing a hippo costume for their performance last night, and you can see it here

Not even being sarcastic, this hippo killed it on this rendition of My perogative. The judges were impressively on the right track here, correctly assuming he was under 30, not a singer, and likely an athlete. But in the end, they were stumped. So came the unveiling, which as Jeef D Lowe put it, was ridiculous

Just so over the top and funny as is, but like I hinted at in the title, the timing of all this is what really makes it. The Steelers, and particularly Antonio Brown, have been all over the headlines in the sports world and then BOOM: He pops up as a dancing/singing hippo on some stupid gameshow. And I know this was definitely filmed weeks, maybe even months ago, but it’s just still funny how it aired now during this fiasco. You can’t even make this shit up. Keep it coming boys. The meltdown in Pittsburgh has been very fun to watch.

PS: Black culture is pretty funny to me, and one term that’s used often is Uncle Tom. I bring this up because of this

Ryan Clark made a comment about how Antonio Brown should be traded, and Antonio commented on this instagram post and called him an Uncle Tom. Black people use this term in a derogatory way and I just don’t get it. I haven’t read the classic novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but isn’t Tom the good guy? Isn’t he a hero in the story? I get that the slur is usually said by blacks to other blacks as a way of saying “Stop siding with white people”, but it just doesn’t make sense to me. After all, Uncle Tom sacrifices his life and gets beat to death by a slave owner for not snitching on 2 runaway slaves, so he seems like a good guy to me and the insult is dumb.