Ten years ago, Seth Meyers’s dog, Frisbee, joined him and his wife, Alexi Ashe Meyers, on Late Night, where he compared his little Italian greyhound to a champion Italian greyhound named Cora. When the two dogs stood together, the differences were glaring: Cora was a little bigger than Frisbee, stood more elegantly, and could be coaxed into jumping over a low bar in a mini-agility course. Frisbee, on the other hand, cowered and faced away from the camera. “Find your lens,” he encouraged his dog. When his wife tried to guide Frisbee to the agility jump, Frisbee planted herself on the ground. She had no interest in fame or even really impressing anyone. It was a miracle, maybe, that she could sit on command.
Frisbee died after 14 “amazing years,” Meyers announced on Instagram on August 19. “She was at her best curled in your lap and patient when we dressed her up like a pilgrim,” he wrote. In the photos he shared, Frisbee appeared as she was wont to do: wide-eyed, nervy, simultaneously cowering and cuddly. The comments on Meyers’s Instagram post varied wildly in tone, with blue-checkmark celebrity friends wishing their sincere condolences and random users drawing attention to none other than Meyers’s former SNL co-star and current podcast co-host Andy Samberg. “May her ghost haunt Andy Samberg forever,” reads the top comment on the post, with another user later on adding that, “The collective love for her from the masses built a barrier Samberg’s vitriol could never pierce.”
The rivalry, for lack of a better word, between Samberg and Frisbee was long-standing and well-documented. Two years ago, Samberg did a segment called “A Grosser Look” (riffing on Meyers’s segment “A Closer Look”), in which he described Frisbee as “Seth’s nightmare-inducing hellspawn” and “the worst greyhound since the bus.” Only a few months ago on Amy Poehler’s podcast Good Hang, Meyers prompted Poehler to trick Samberg into thinking that Frisbee died. “Don’t even play,” Samberg said with a laugh, “because I’ll be so happy.” How fitting, in turn, that Samberg’s birthday was August 18, the day before Meyers shared the news. That Frisbee has enough of a sense of comedic timing to align her death with Samberg’s birthday suggests she knew more than she was letting on with her bug-eyed stare and open-mouthed grin. If Samberg accomplished anything in his ongoing hatred of Frisbee, it was cementing her status as a celebrity dog worthy of its own Vulture obit. He should know that all publicity is good publicity, and to that end, Frisbee had some of the best PR in the game.
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