The quasi-official end of the summer of 2024 comes this weekend. And there has been one dominant joke premise to the season: the hotly contested presidential campaign.
Has any other political race in history generated as much news/comedy as the one we have witnessed, slack-jawed, over the past several months? I don’t think so. The shocking twists have come so often and so unrelentingly it has looked like a paperback in a rack at the airport covered in blurbs like “You won’t believe the twists in this one!” or “Not to be missed!”
And yet, thanks to the usual vacation breaks and pauses that always fill the schedules of television’s late-night shows in the summertime, a whole lot has been missed. At least in terms of comic opportunities for television’s late-night hosts.
The latest examples, from this week alone:
- Donald Trump posted an online infomercial selling digital “trading cards,” featuring swatches from the “knockout suit” he wore to his infamous debate with Joe Biden in June. Just $99 for each card! (Seriously, 99 bucks for a mass-produced photo of him—accompanied not by a flavorless slab of bubblegum, but a tasteless cutout of cloth. Not exactly a Mickey Mantle rookie card.)
- Trump reposted a social media message picturing everyone from Dr. Fauci to Bill Gates in orange prison jumpsuits, and calling for President Obama to face a military tribunal.
- Trump reposted a pretty disgusting message that linked Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, his two female presidential opponents, by a sex act.
- Trump led an intrusion into Arlington National Cemetery that violated a federal law against using that sacred place for political gain, with a side outrage of physically bullying a female Army official who tried to point out this was not allowed.
- And Harris finally had a sit-down interview with a legitimate journalistic organization.
This last bit would not normally be major news, but media on both the left and right had so pumped it up as an event that the interview was anticipated like the arrival of Cleopatra in Rome in a palanquin carried by four shirtless, sweaty musclemen. (A palanquin is the word for that four-beamed litter with a theater box attached that was apparently all the rage in ancient Egypt—and yes, I looked it up.)
All that in the space of a few days. Talk about ready-made laughs.
And yet, all has been quiet on the late-night front. Not one of the major late-night comedy shows has been on the air this week—at least not with new episodes (Real Time With Bill Maher is the exception, though that doesn’t air until 10 p.m. on Friday), which makes the philosophical thought experiment inevitable: If a joke lands in an empty writers’ room, does anybody laugh?
This week is not an anomaly. The entire summer has been marked by lost opportunities. Many of the political world’s most eye-popping moments have happened when one—or all—of the major shows have not been on the air. Biden’s disastrous meltdown during the first debate on June 27, the first storm cloud that began the swirl that eventually morphed into Hurricane Cassandra, was left to Jon Stewart alone to pick apart on The Daily Show.
A grand plan to do the same during the Republican National Convention almost went tragically awry when Trump was nicked by an assassin’s bullet (not that this exact incident would have made for rich comedy fodder.) The Daily Show was forced out of its scheduled venue in Milwaukee and wound up canceling its entire planned week of broadcasting from on the ground at the RNC.
When the news hurricane made landfall and kicked up the earthquake of Biden’s sudden withdrawal from the 2024 presidential campaign—just 72 hours following the close of the RNC—two major shows, The Daily Show and Late Night with Seth Meyers, were on hiatus, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! was using guest hosts as Kimmel took his annual summer vacation.
Kimmel has been a central voice in the political commentary in late night—enough to get deep under the orange skin of one of the candidates. The sheer number of comedy topics he has missed the chance to make fun of would fill several dozen monologues. Beyond the big events you had: J.D. Vance and Tim Walz, childless cat ladies, weird candidates, couches, drag photos, tampons, kids who love their dads, flannel shirts, Harris “turning” Black, donut shop visits, and more.
Kimmel will be back next week, which should be interesting.
There’s another late-night show that surely would have spent the past three months with jokes busting out all over, but Saturday Night Live has also been dark (as is always the case in the summer). By the time it returns on September 28, it may have to do a speed-reading version of a cold open.
Unless, of course, other big news breaks in the week before SNL kicks off its monumental 50th season. (That prospect ought to get short odds in Vegas.)
Things should settle into a more normal pattern shortly after the last Labor Day barbecue is extinguished. “Normal” as in, busy times for every late-night show; “abnormal” as in, frenetically-paced. Still, the summer had plenty of worthy highlights.
Best host of the summer: have to give it to Stewart, who came back to be a part-time player in an election year and succeeded to the max.
Best sketch of the summer: Laura Benanti as Melania on The Late Show.
Best joke of the summer: Not delivered by any host. Michelle Obama: “Who’s going to tell [Trump] that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”
In this summer of missed opportunities, what wasn’t lost—and indeed made it onto the air—has been solid comedy across all the major late-night shows. Which makes sense, because opportunities for humor have been all over the landscape.
All any good late-night host or writer has needed to do was show up—and bring a pitchfork.
