Frisbee, the Italian Greyhound belonging to Seth Meyers and his family, died in August 2025 at the age of 14. Meyers announced it on Instagram on August 19 with a run of photographs: a puppy, a Thanksgiving costume shoot, a dog stretched out in the sun on a boat.
“Thanks for 14 amazing years, girl,” he wrote.
Fourteen is a full life for an Italian Greyhound. The breed typically lives somewhere in the range of twelve to fifteen years, which means Frisbee got to the far end of a good one, most of it apparently spent curled in somebody’s lap.
What is unusual is not that a comedian’s dog died. It is that so many people who never met her feel like they knew her. And the reason for that is genuinely strange: Frisbee was famous mostly because one man kept saying, on camera, over a period of years, that he could not stand her.
The bit
The man was Andy Samberg, a friend of Meyers going back to their Saturday Night Live years, and the running gag was that he loathed this small, shivering, entirely inoffensive dog.
He did not soften it. On Meyers’ show, he called Frisbee “Seth’s nightmare-inducing hellspawn” and “the worst greyhound since the bus.” He did not walk it back over time, either. Appearing on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, when Poehler was put up to telling him that Frisbee had died as a prank, his response was, “Don’t even play, ‘cause I’ll be so happy.”
And there was the Christmas card. Meyers has described sending the family card, Frisbee included, as she was every year, and getting it back in the mail with her face scratched out.
None of this was real, obviously. That is what a bit is. But it ran long enough, and Samberg committed hard enough, that the joke became load-bearing.
What a decade-long joke actually does
Here is the thing about most celebrity pets: you learn their name, you see a photo, you forget. Frisbee had a nemesis, and a nemesis gives you a story, and a story is the thing people actually hold onto.
Because Samberg kept attacking her, Frisbee kept getting defended. She turned up on Late Night over and over. A dog psychic was brought on to consult with her and reported, memorably, that Frisbee had no idea her owner was a celebrity. She wore a pilgrim costume while Meyers’ sons dressed as turkeys. When Westminster host David Frei appeared, Frisbee was put up against a champion Italian Greyhound and awarded an honorary Best in Show.
She even made it into The Mindy Project, which is why Ike Barinholtz’s condolence note read, “RIP to my former scene partner.”
By the end, the comments under Meyers’ post were doing what fans do with a shared character. Amy Poehler wrote, “Frisbee forever.” Kenan Thompson wrote, “Oh nooooo!!! So sorry buddy!!!” And a good chunk of the rest were about Samberg, in the specific tone of people who all understand the same joke: fans noting that Frisbee had died the day after his birthday, asking whether anyone had an alibi for him, hoping her ghost would haunt him.
That is a lot of collective feeling for a dog most of these people saw for maybe ninety seconds at a time.
The part that isn’t a bit
Somewhere underneath the running gag is the ordinary thing, which is that a family had a dog for fourteen years and now does not.
The photos Meyers posted are not bit photos. They are the pictures anyone takes: the dog as a puppy, before you know how long you get. The dog in a stupid costume because your kids wanted it. The dog asleep in the sun. He described her as being at her best curled in a lap, and as a dog he was happy to go grey alongside, which is the kind of line you only write about an animal who was there for the whole stretch of your life that mattered.
The feud made her public. It is not what made her his.
Fourteen good years, most of them warm, most of them on somebody. As one fan put it in the comments, the collective love for her built a wall that Samberg’s vitriol was never getting through.
