Have we had enough? Can we finally take a step back from sticking our faces out and trying to drink from the firehose of news that has engulfed the nation over the past three-plus weeks? Just to maybe catch our breath for a day? Before it starts to feel like waterboarding?
If that’s been a struggle for most average Americans, and it sure seems like it has been, imagine the toll it has been taking on people whose job it is to make sense, or nonsense, of it all. That is: the people who write and perform the running comic commentary on our daily events.
Yes, the professionals of American late night TV.
With Joe Biden bowing out of the presidential race, this weekend brought yet another twist to the 2024 election, which was already playing like a deranged Knives Out sequel.
But here’s one more twist: only a few of the familiar late-night shows were sitting on the tarmac Sunday night, propellers whirring, preparing to launch a new bombing raid on the craziness happening on the ground in Washington, Mar-a-Lago, and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
That’s how it is with summer scheduling. Late-night shows go dark for vacation (and, this year, for the Olympics). That means there will be no new editions of The Daily Show this week and thus no new Jon Stewart take on the Richter-busting earthquake in the race: Biden out, Kamala Harris (likely) in.
Seth Meyers, who has built the living spine of his Late Night show around his trenchantly funny observations of politics, with special emphasis on his cosmic disdain for Donald Trump, is off for the next three weeks. By the time he gets back, the Republicans may be running a ticket of Orbán and Bannon.
Jimmy Kimmel’s skillful efforts to comedically peel the skin off the Republican nominee have wormed their way so far under that skin the nominee can’t even tell that his Elmer Fudd-like tantrums only enhance the standing of the wascally wabbit driving him so mad with frustration. But Kimmel took the whole summer off.
The Kimmel show is new tonight, and the writers will surely craft a fusillade of fresh jokes about the lunatic state of the race; but the guest host, actor/comedian Lamorne Morris, is not a known protagonist in the political polemics of late-night monologues.
Bill Maher had his regular show on HBO Max Friday and delivered a stinging, especially memorable monologue about the twisted (that word again) propensity of some in the Trump camp to ascribe to the former president the status of a demigod, and who see his assassination attempt survival as proof of God’s intervention on behalf of the MAGA cause. “The idea that God protects your heroes and not mine? That isn’t cool either,” Maher said.
But Maher missed this latest bit of god-foolery by a day and a half. And Real Time won’t be back with new episodes again until the end of August.
John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight was perfectly lined up for him to be the first late-night star to get a crack at exploring the latest serving of election-year madness, except he taped his show on Saturday night. Which means the title of the show would be more appropriate if it was named Last Week—Ending Saturday Because You Know the New Week Officially Begins on Sunday—Tonight.
But Oliver gets special credit for completely anticipating that he would miss another burst of explosive news, by saying at the top of his show: “The news is moving so fast. We are taping on Saturday and who knows where things will be by the time you actually watch this?”
Bullseye.
That leaves Jimmy Fallon—who will surely tell some jokes about the Biden news, but who depends least on off-the-news humor—but mostly Stephen Colbert to mine the riches of historic-event gold. Colbert has a deep appreciation for the comedy of the absurd so he will likely take full advantage Monday night.
Unless something happens between now and when he tapes.
What has happened over the past three weeks has been so outrageously can-you-top-this absurd, the series of events might be rejected as over-the-top in a fictional film about late-night writers desperate for political material:
A candidate mentally melts down at a debate; calls begin for him to step down; his opponent goes on rants about sharks and Hannibal Lecter; that candidate is almost assassinated at a rally; the other candidate reaches out to offer a sympathetic, well, hand; the survivor candidate goes to his convention wearing a manila-envelope bandage on his ear and delivers an interminable, meandering rant of a speech; the other candidate quits the race. While recuperating from his latest bout of COVID.
When else has fate handed late-night comedy such a mind-boggling sequence in a matter of days?
OK, there was 1968, when Carson reigned: RFK joined the presidential race March 16; LBJ quit the race March 31; MLK was assassinated four days later; RFK was killed June 6.
That was a busy—and unfunny—time for sure.
And though in its time it could have only generated material for political cartoonists, there was a lot happening in the spring of 1865: the Civil War ended on April 9; Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14 and died the following morning; Andrew Johnson was inaugurated the same day; Booth was caught and killed on April 26.
Certainly eventful.
In both those cases, from the perspective of much time having passed, the crash of gigantic events converging in such a short space of time seems almost too bizarre to be believed, and also not very funny.
For some future generation, that may come to be the case for the period we are living through now. “What happened in the presidential election race in the summer of 2024, Daddy?”
At least they can go back and check the clips from some of those long-forgotten late-night shows.
