Do late-night shows still have to prove they can turn breaking news into breakout comedy on the fly?
For anyone still wondering, check out Thursday night’s monologues.
The day-long tweet war between former best bros Donald Trump and Elon Musk was like a serving of instant pudding, with every late-night show scrapping jokes that were slated to dominate their monologues in favor of whipping up gleeful rundowns of the two kids fighting in the park.
Wait, that was Trump’s description of Russia vs Ukraine. This was two much more powerful and rich opponents.
With two high-profile, recurring monologue characters to explore, the jokes flowed like vintage bottles of Trump wine. And the hosts were lapping it up.
On ABC, Jimmy Kimmel plastered his huge video wall with the “really big bomb” tweet from Musk, saying Trump was in the Epstein files, and concluding with the zinger: “Have a nice day, DJT!” (Accompanied by video of a nuclear explosion.)
Kimmel, who has just a little history with Trump, could not restrain his happiness at the level of venom the feud had already reached. “I knew this day would come and yet somehow it’s even better than I imagined. It’s like coming down the stairs on Christmas morning and finding a second tree.”
On CBS, another committed Trump arch-enemy, was also a picture of schadenfreude-filled joy. “Oh, Oh damn!” Stephen Colbert gushed. “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
On The Daily Show, host Michael Kosta thought it was a nice touch that Musk, having suggested Trump was a pedophile, told him to have a nice day.
“I don’t know if Trump is,” Kosta said, “but I sure am!”
So was Seth Meyers on NBC’s Late Night. “I’m having a pretty nice day.”
The news clearly energized all the hosts. Of course, as usually happens with hot news fresh from the writers’ rooms, the jokes were often exact or near duplicates.
Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show: “Their relationship went off a cliff faster than a self-driving Tesla.”
Kosta: “This is Elon saying, I made you. And like everything else I make, I can blow you up.”
Fallon: “Elon was like, don’t do this, I have a hundred kids to feed.”
Kosta : “For days now there’s been a simmering tension between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the leader of the free world and the breeder of the free world.”
The audiences were almost as juiced by the news as the hosts, at least partly because the shows were delivering the events of the day to people who apparently hadn’t yet heard about them.
The Epstein tweet especially played like a legit bombshell drawing as many “woohs” as laughs from the studio audiences on both coasts.
Some lines were just part of what has really been said and not written jokes at all, like Musk’s railing about the budget bill and including a shot of the poster for the movie Kill Bill.
But the most automatic laughs were from a tweet that every show referenced, and even with audience members not up to speed on what had happened, only had to put out there with minimal set up. It was a plea for peace—from Kanye West.
“Broooos, please noooooo, We love you both so much.”
Kimmel’s tag: “That’s when you know things are nuts; when the guy trying to bring everyone together is Kanye West.”
Kimmel acknowledged that his show had worked much of the day on a monologue based on Trump’s appointment of a 22-year-old ex-lawn care worker to be in charge of a federal anti- terrorism unit. (Illustrated by the familiar photo of first-term Trump apparently giving instructions to a 13-ish kid cutting the White House lawn.)
Of course, the shows dug back into the (very) recent past to note how these two men had been on such warm, even affectionate terms. They also made the point that a break-up was inevitable.
For Colbert it was a marriage-counseling cold open.
Kosta said, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe it. The thing that was always going to happen is now happening. I thought these two billionaires with the world’s biggest egos would work it out amicably.”
Kimmel spoke of the good times these two powerful men had enjoyed together. He found a really ripe tweet that Musk wrote in February:
“I love Trump as much as a straight man can love another man.”
After some vocal disgust from the audience, Kimmel said, “They couldn’t quit each other. It was like Woke-Back Mountain with these guys.”
And every show displayed some shots of Trump pushing like a car salesman the most recent lines of Teslas, arrayed on the White House lawn.
Colbert said, “Trump is going to have to get one of those stickers that say ‘I bought this before Elon told everyone I was on Epstein’s plane.’”
With a geyser of news like this, a late-night show of the past would be able to count on about a week of nightly jokes about it. But that was of another era. In the current one, Trump almost always does something else outrageous to push the previous events out of the monologues quickly.
But at least they got one night out of it .
Seth Meyers summed up how the late-night hosts were feeling: “Watching these guys destroy each other is both big and… beautiful.”
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what if they finally figured out a way to make everyone in the media implode themselves with a few well placed intentionally misleading tweets leading to massive liable and slander lawsuits.
Well done, Bill. 😄