Dick Cheney Hunting Incident - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

The incident was the subject of jokes, satire and public ridicule. A number of these made reference to other controversies involving Cheney.

• David Letterman began his Monday show on February 13 with "Good news, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally located weapons of mass destruction.... It's Dick Cheney," and adding that "We can't get bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney." His Top 10 list was devoted to "Dick Cheney's excuses" and included "he thought the guy was trying to go gay cowboy on me".
• Jay Leno also had a piece on The Tonight Show in which he pretended to host a game show with footage of George W. Bush and Pervez Musharraf that was taken during Bush's visit to Pakistan. Towards the end of that segment, the sound of loud bird calls were played, and Leno asked Cheney to take care of the problem, with footage of the Vice President shooting a gun then shown.
• Texas Monthly won the 2007 Best Cover Line of the Year Award from the Magazine Publishers of America for its January 2007 cover captioned "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, Dick Cheney Will Shoot You in the Face".
• Jon Stewart popularized the phrase "Cheney's Got a Gun" (a play on the 1989 Aerosmith song "Janie's Got a Gun") on The Daily Show soon after the event. Stewart and the Daily Show 's correspondents repeatedly accentuated their disbelief of the absurdity of a sitting vice president shooting a 78-year-old man in the face while hunting quail which are raised in a pen and released mere seconds before they are shot. Stewart, for instance, pointed out that Whittington had been the first person to be shot by a sitting vice president since Alexander Hamilton, and that while Aaron Burr's fatal shooting of Hamilton was during a duel over issues of honor and political maneuvering; Whittington "was mistaken for a bird." Correspondent Ed Helms, reporting supposedly from Corpus Christi Hospital, said that Whittington's condition had been upgraded from "stable" to "stable, but still shot in the face by Dick Cheney." The show also used graphics from the video game Duck Hunt. After Whittington's post-discharge press conference, Stewart noted that Cheney's power was such that upon shooting someone, the victim would apologize.
• On his first show after the incident, Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, confessed to having been involved in a hunting accident of his own over the weekend, then proceeded to show an edited version of Brit Hume's interview with Dick Cheney, featuring Colbert in place of Cheney with far more humorous responses to Hume's question. Colbert later mentioned the hunting incident in his now famous speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
• The incident has been parodied three times in the comedy Family Guy:
  • In the season 4 episode "Petergeist", Cheney shoots Peter at point-blank range several times while hunting, and after says "I'm sorry, I thought you were a deer"
  • In the season 5 episode "Boys Do Cry", Cheney guards the president's house with a shotgun, and while sleeping says "18% approval ratings... I'll give you 18% of my foot in your ass" in reference to the drop in approval ratings to 18% which followed the shooting.
  • In the season 5 episode "Meet the Quagmires", death says to Peter that "Dick Cheney shot "Supreme Court Justice Scalia" in a hunting accident and the bullet went right through him and killed Karl Rove and Tucker Carlson", referencing the incident.
• South Park parodied the incident in the season 10 episode "Mystery of the Urinal Deuce". Cheney attempts to fire a crossbow to kill Stan and Kyle but misses, leading him to exclaim: "Dang it! I missed again!"
• In the Robot Chicken episode "I'm Trapped," Cheney is captured by terrorists in Afghanistan but escapes after stealing a suit of armor (a parody of the movie Iron Man). The scene then changes to a forest, where Cheney, still wearing the armor, shoots a hunter in the face and declares, "Meh, thought he was a bird."
• During a Saturday Night Live skit, Kristen Wiig as Diane Sawyer mentions the incident during a mock interview regarding Cheney's accomplishments as vice president in which he denies feeling any regrets for the situation.
• In his stand-up show The Fifth Annual End of the World Tour, Christopher Titus observes that "... president is in bad shape if the only way to take attention off of him is have the vice president shoot a buddy in the face."
• In Will Ferrell's You're Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush, Ferrell (as Bush) describes Cheney as "a guy so charismatic he could shoot a man in the face with a shotgun...and then have that guy apologize to him."
• President Obama also joked about this subject. In his speech for the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner on May 9, 2009, he said Mr Cheney was 'very busy working on his memoirs, tentatively titled, How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People.'
• President Obama once again joked about the incident at the White House Correspondents Dinner on April 30, 2011, repeating the exact phrase he used at the dinner on May 9, 2009.
• "The Dick Song" from the industrial metal band Ministry's album The Last Sucker includes lyrics such as "Run, run, run, Cheney's got a gun" and audio from speeches edited to say "And I don't think it would surprise the American people, I have killed hundreds of people. Fellow citizens, I'm armed with knives."
• During development of the video game Halo 3, an achievement titled "Cheneymania!" was given if the player gets 10 consecutive kills using only a shotgun. However, it was cut and replaced with "Open Season!" in the final game.