March 23, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – John Oliver’s new book mocking the family of Vice President Mike Pence has become a surprise bestseller.
This week, Pence’s daughter Charlotte released a children’s book titled Marlon Bundo’s A Day in the Life of the Vice President, featuring the Pence family’s pet rabbit as the lead character. Proceeds from the book will go to the Tracy’s Kids art therapy program and the anti-human trafficking nonprofit A21.
Last Sunday, Oliver used his HBO show Last Week Tonight to launch a children’s book of his own: A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, which has Marlon fall in love with another boy rabbit. Oliver quipped that his fictional rabbit was “gay—just like the real Marlon Bundo.”
“With its message of tolerance and advocacy, this charming children's book explores issues of same sex marriage and democracy,” the book’s product description claims. Its proceeds will go to the pro-homosexual youth group Trevor Project and the nonprofit AIDS United.
Another reason to buy his parody, Oliver said, was that “selling more books than Pence will probably really piss him off.”
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Following the book’s sudden announcement and release, TIME reports that by Wednesday Oliver’s book had sold more than 180,000 copies and was temporarily out of stock on Amazon. Charlotte Pence’s original book has received less fanfare, but is performing strongly as well; its Amazon listing labels it a #1 bestseller in Children’s United States Biographies.
While liberal Americans have enthusiastically embraced Oliver’s parody, others call it a petty swipe against an apolitical private citizen over her father’s values on marriage, faith, and sexuality.
Writing at the Washington Free Beacon, Alex Griswold noted that during the Sunday segment Oliver “at first struggled to explain why the book was worth attacking in the first place” before deciding that the Pences concluding their book tour at “Focus on the F***ing Family” sufficed.
Such attacks from comedians like Oliver and Chelsea Handler, Griswold writes, are little more than “futile scream[s] into the aether of social media at the mere sight of a hated foe.”
For her part, Charlotte Pence has taken the attention in stride.
“I have bought his book,” she said Wednesday. “He’s giving proceeds of the book to charity, and we’re also giving proceeds of our book to charity, so I really think that we can all get behind it.”