Clay Takes Heat for TV Outfits, Mrs. Travis Weighs In

CLAY: Buck, this morning I was on Fox & Friends — thought I did a decent job — go back downstairs, making the kids breakfast, sit down to check my email, and I get an email from a woman named Joanne, I believe. Let me see here. Yeah, Joanne emails me. Joanne might be listening right now. Joanne. The subject line, Buck, is just, “Appearance.” All right? So I click on it. Just “Appearance.”

She says, “Please shave and fix your shirt collars. You always look unkept,” and so I retweeted that this morning and over a hundred people have responded giving different theories and responses to how I look, and this also is building out of when we hung out with Ron DeSantis.

I put up a photo with Ron DeSantis and I texted you and I was like, “If you want to be entertained…” I’m just getting crushed in the comments. So, Buck, like, right before we’re going on the air my wife is now going through reading all of the critiques of my appearances and flagging the ones that she agrees with and sending them to me.

BUCK: That’s real love, though. She wants what’s best for you, Clay. She wants to make sure the Clay train stays on the tracks.

CLAY: It is absolutely true, but I think it would stun people how much attention is paid not to anything that you say on television at all but just to at what you wear, the cosmetic — and we’re dudes. Incidents like either one of us are like, “Oh, my God,” you know, like we’re not fashion models or anything. It staggered me the first time I went on television. Almost no one cared what I said. Everybody was like, “Why were you wearing that tie? Why were you wearing that color suit?” like, everything. “Why you have those shoes?”

BUCK: For everyone who thinks you go on TV in the news world and it’s all just sort of fun, first of all, it’s like not glamorous really at all. For anybody who knows the business, you’re kind of kind of just running into a place, trying to get the microphone. You particularly feeling unglamorous when you go on TV and this used to happen to me particularly when I used to go particularly on CNN. Clay, you’ve done some CNN —

CLAY: Back in the day.

BUCK: — although not a little while. The things people say… There are things that are so mean that I actually have laughed because it was so mean that it was funny. Did you have one…? I remember I went on once; I think I was talking about some kind of CIA stuff overseas, national security, not politics. I wasn’t like, “Oh, I love Trump and like I hate the commies,” which while true is not what I always talk about. And I came off, and someone told me that I looked like Mrs. Doubtfire, which I got to say… I was like (laughing) almost pulled a muscle.

CLAY: Really funny.

BUCK: It was so mean but so funny at the same time. I never forgot that one. I was like, Mrs. Doubtfire.

CLAY: That is perfect. One day I was on and I remember somebody just wrote. Somebody just wrote… I had just done a hit, and it was — I don’t know — like talking about who’s gonna win the Alabama-Auburn game, right, whatever was it. And someone just wrote, “You are really fat and ugly, and also you have the worst bags under your eyes of anyone I’ve ever seen.” And it was just so direct and just negative. And I just remember looking at note… I was just picking the winner of the Alabama-Auburn game. It’s not like, you know… I didn’t even think that much about anything else.

BUCK: The worst is when they suck you in with something that’s a little nice first. I remember once I got… Again, the CNN stuff used to be… The Fox audience, it’s like I’m talking to my family. It’s like we’re all hanging out in our pajamas watching a movie together. The Fox audience is fantastic, right, but on CNN once again some random woman wrote in to me probably, you know, I don’t know any —

CLAY: Might have been Joanne. Might have been Joanne.

BUCK: Might have been Joanne. It’s what she does. And she was like, “You do have nice hair. However, you have to lose about 10 to 15 pounds and then we could see your jaw line and you’d have a nice face too.”

CLAY: That is fantastic.

BUCK: I was like, “Wow. So specific.” It’s like I’m getting an email from my plastic surgeon.

CLAY: That is really funny. I remember I bought a new suit — and my wife will remember this. When I got hired by Fox, I was like, “Oh, man, I gotta go get a suit.” The suit was like a thousand dollars, whatever, a lot of money for me to be spending at the time. Still a lot of money to be spending on a suit. And I thought it looked pretty good, and I remember I wore it on air, and they had a full body shot.

And somebody just, like, grabbed a picture of me, and they were like, “How is it possible for you to look more like a box?” And, like, the way that the suit was cut but also, like, I did look just like a box, and I’m like I spent a thousand dollars on this suit, and it is like somebody had screenshotted me and sent me an image and I just looked like a box, right? I mean, there was no, like, waist on the suit, and I’m here looking at it and being like, “This is the most expensive suit I’ve ever owned and looks ridiculous.”

BUCK: So just anybody who’s ever thinking about a career in media, just remember they’re the great folks that we got to see, for example, down in Houston. Our extended family listening to the show and that makes it all worthwhile. There are also trolls out there who no matter who you are, no matter what you’re saying on TV, they’ll just find a way to drill in and say the meanest — but kind of sometimes funny but usually just mean — stuff you could ever imagine. So, hey, Clay, it keeps us humble, right? Like, you know, someone’s telling me every day that I’m fat, stupid, and should go jump off a bridge, it’s like, “Oh.” Can’t get high on yourself.

CLAY: Hey, maybe you could become the next vice president. Might be even better.