CNN’s Don Lemon Cannot Handle New Orleans

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Some people can’t handle New Orleans.

This much is clear to almost anyone who has spent time in the French Quarter, where frat boys that have been tossed of strip clubs, hysterical bachelorette party stragglers and other invasive species have managed to embed themselves in the local ecosystem. Hell, earlier today I saw a young man—sugary mixed drink in hand—vomiting on (not in) a trash can near the corner of Decatur and Governor Nicholls.

It wasn’t even 1pm.

The point here is that New Orleans is no stranger to people who don’t know their limits. And people who don’t know their limits are no strangers to New Orleans.

Take CNN anchor Don Lemon, for instance. Despite being raised just a few dozen miles upriver, the 50-year-old Baton Rouge native is on a mission to prove that he isn’t cut out for business trips to the Big Easy.

As you may recall, Lemon ran into some controversy a year ago when he told co-host Kathy Griffin she had a “nice rack” during CNN’s countdown-to-2016 broadcast. Apparently not content with this modest legacy, the anchor found a way to outdo himself with flying colors during the network’s countdown-to-2017 broadcast on Saturday night.

Lemon held down the Central Time Zone segment of the countdown with co-host Brooke Baldwin, who joined him at Frenchmen Street’s Spotted Cat Music Club. CNN producers finally cut his mic off a little after midnight, but not before he took multiple shots of tequila, drunkenly got his ear pierced, poured his heart out to millions of people and declared 2016 “awful.”

Let’s take a look at some of the videos:

A harbinger of things to come

One tequila

Two tequila, or “the tequila is, like, emitting from your pores”

In which Kathy Griffin encourages Don Lemon to get his nipples pierced, but Brooke Baldwin talks him out of it

“New Orleans is lit”/”I’m open to a relationship”/”I’m a bad person to date”/”But I don’t really do resolutions”

Auld Lang Syne, or “so 2016 was awful”