Missed Monday’s late-night monologues? We’ve got you covered with our round-up of the night’s best laughs from across the dial.
Hunted No More
“Hypocrisy is not illegal,” isn’t the most inspiring political message. Especially during a period in American history where one political party has trampled every democratic norm and exploited every conceivable loophole to cater to the whims of an egomaniac hellbent on destroying the rule of law in pursuit of enough wealth and slavish obedience required to fill the yawning chasm where his soul should have been.
Still, President Joe Biden’s decision this weekend to issue a blanket pardon to his son Hunter left Democrats scrambling to backtrack up the moral high road they’d assumed was their domain going into the uncharted lawlessness of a second Donald Trump administration. As Jon Stewart put it tonight, naturally it’s not as black-and-white as now-crowing Republicans would have it. The GOP legal pursuit of Hunter Biden for a misspent life of drug abuse, sexual escapades, gun charges, and tax evasion has had as much partisan pettiness and political vindictiveness to it as actual quest for impartial justice. And Trump’s incoming threats to mobilize every facet of the federal government in a single-minded rampage of retribution against his political opponents and critics almost certainly meant that Hunter Biden would face legal penalties far outweighing his actual crimes.
And yet. As Stewart and other late-night hosts had to admit, President Biden has put Democrats in a tough spot. It’s hard enough to mount a defense of democracy, fairness, and the rule of law when a truly lawless and conscience-free political party led by a would-be dictator is preparing to urinate all over those supposed inviolable principles from a great and disdainful height. But when Joe Biden’s long-held promise to never, ever do the thing he just did has been held up as a pillar of Democrats’ dedication to those principles, kicking that support out is also a kick right to the guts.
Stewart capped off his unflinching takedown of this example of political hypocrisy by noting that, if Democrats are going to work those loopholes, they should at least do so for the common good. (Like, just to pick an example, commuting death sentences to prevent a bloodthirsty Trump from going on another execution spree on federal death row prisoners, some of whom have had their convictions seriously questioned.) “Rules, loopholes, and norms. The distance between the systems Democrats say they are revering and the one that they’re using when they need to is the reason why people think it’s rigged. Use the rules, use the loopholes, f**k the norms. But also use it to help the people, not just those people related to you. “
“In other words, the Biden presidency has now entered the ‘grandpa doesn’t give a damn about what you think’ phase.”
jimmy kimmel
“I think this pardon proves that, with less than two months to go, Joe is officially out of malarkeys. And by malarkeys, I mean f**ks.”
stephen colbert
“Now I’m no presidential historian but I believe this is the first time a U.S. president has pardoned both his son and a turkey in the same week.”
jimmy kimmel
“Why this weekend? Normally you drop a controversial pardon like the way you buy porn at a gas station. In a flurry of other distracting purposes and pardons. ‘Uh, would you give me those breath mints there, that WD-40, that squeegee there, one of those anal magazines, some Corn Nuts, a pardon for my son, the Big Dicks Like Chicks pamphlet.'”
jon stewart
“He dropped the pardon out of nowhere like it was a Kendrick Lamar album.”
jimmy kimmel
[On the time span covered by Biden’s pardon] “Eleven years is a very specific and not rounded amount of time. ‘So Hunter, I’ll give you a pardon. Five years, ten years.’ ‘It needs to be eleven. And if you would be so kind, make sure this upcoming New Year’s Eve is also covered.'”
jon stewart
“So it’s less of a blanket pardon and more of a tarp.”
stephen colbert
“Democrats are divided. Some of them are upset while others are Hunter Biden.”
jimmy fallon
“And I get why they’d be angry. Does Biden’s word mean nothing? Can we trust anything he says? When he goes, ‘I’m serious folks, I’m not kidding around, no joke,’ was he in fact kidding around, yes joke?”
stephen colbert
“It’s kind of nice, it’s like for his last act as President, Biden united the country.”
jimmy fallon
[On news that Biden made up his mind on the pardon over his family’s holiday dinner] “Thanksgiving! I knew it. Perhaps I can explain how this pardon went down in my new one man show, Can You Get Hunter to Stop Looking at Me Like That?”
jon stewart
“I don’t know if it was the right thing to do, but you certainly earned that World’s Greatest Dad mug.”
stephen colbert
“I wonder if Joe now has to get Hunter anything for Christmas. This is good enough, right?”
jimmy kimmel
[On Fox News’ Ainsley Earhardt’s sanctimonious claim that her father always told her he’d never come to her aid if she got in trouble] “Your dad always told you that? Were you a degenerate or was your dad De Niro? ‘Listen to me, you get pinched, I’m not your first phone call. I don’t know you. There’s ten grand a gun in the floorboards. Good luck kid.'”
jon stewart
“They have to be kidding, right? Everyone who voted to let a 34-time convicted felon off the hook is very mad about Joe Biden letting his son off the hook.”
jimmy kimmel
[On former Fox News figure Megyn Kelly stating, “F**k you, Joe Biden” on her podcast] “Megyn Kelly who do you think you are? Me? What am I supposed to say now?”
jon stewart
[On Donald Trump’s predictable segue from condemning Biden’s pardon to a complaint that he didn’t also pardon the January 6 insurrectionists(?)] “‘Oh you pardoned your son, what about the people who helped me try to overthrow the government?’ There’s kind of a leap there. It’s like going, ‘Oh you’re gonna let the kid stay up to watch SNL but you’re not gonna even try to help me burn the neighbor’s house down?'”
jon stewart
The Nitwits Keep on Coming
The holiday season sees Donald Trump opening up his advent calendar of truly terrible cabinet picks like a toddler who just can’t wait to sink his teeth into some sycophantic fudge. This week we got a nominee for French Ambassador who is not only a Trump family hanger-on but also a convicted felon who [checks rap sheet for Jared Kushner’s father Charles] hired a sex worker to blackmail his brother in law as part of a witness tampering scheme related to tax evasion and illegal GOP campaign contributions. I mean, the elder Kusher’s not technically a sex trafficker of underage girls (that we know of), so at least it’s a step up from Trump’s former pick to head the FBI. (Oh, and Kushner was pardoned by Donald Trump, lest current-day Republicans forget.)
Speaking of laughably unqualified and horrifically dangerous FBI nominees, here comes Kash Patel. The boot-kissing Trump loyalist and author of a series of children’s books peddling Q-Anon conspiracy theories to kids in the guise of a fairy tale about king Donald being persecuted by the Deep State has echoed his lord and master’s threats to arrest political enemies—including certain Trump-critical late-night hosts. That led Stephen Colbert to issue the defiant challenge, “Oh really? You see me shake, Kash? Let me help you remember me, okay? I’m the middle-aged, brown-haired white guy with an 11:30 network show. And I will never bow down to authoritarians or my name isn’t Jimmy Something. Write it down!”
“Every pizza place in America’s about to have its doors kicked in by the FBI looking for baby meat in the pepperoni.”
jimmy kimmel
“What seems clear is that Trump is purposely appointing people who promise to destroy the thing they’ve been appointed to run. Next he’s going to replace Smokey the Bear with Flame-O the Arsonist.”
stephen colbert
[On current FBI head Christopher Wray] “Evidently, Trump thought Wray wasn’t enough of a loyalist and soured on him within months. I’m not surprised. It’s hard to keep the spark alive when it’s always FBI and never FB-Us.”
stephen colbert
“Yes, I am a normal adult man who wrote a book in which Donald Trump is king and I am his wizard—for kids.”
jimmy kimmel
“It is really unpleasant to mix conspiracy theories and children’s stories. That’s why bookstores sold hardly any copies of Goodnight We Never Landed On the Moon.”
stephen colbert
“‘I did not meet with Russia in a box. I did not meet with Russia on Fox. I did not meet them in Trump Tower. I did not have a golden shower.'”
jon stewart
“You know what would be really funny? This would be really funny—if Joe pardoned, like, every late-night host. And just because I think it would be a funny bit, I would accept that pardon.”
stephen colbert
“Not only did Trump pardon his son-in-law Jared’s dad—who went to prison for hiring a hooker to frame his own brother-in-law—this weekend he named that same man Ambassador to France.”
jimmy kimmel
“Trump also announced this weekend that his new senior advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs is his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law. It’s like he gave everyone at the dinner table on Thanksgiving a position in his administration.”
jimmy kimmel
The Hegseth Pick of All?
Of course, it isn’t all new horrors in Donald Trump’s quest to surround himself with the most egregiously stupid and unhinged Republicans in the land. His pick to head the Department of Defense, former Fox News talking head Pete Hegseth’s stench of scandal has lingered right through the Thanksgiving weekend.
You may recall that the ridiculously unfit TV figure is covered with white supremacist tattoos. And that he has been accused of a particularly horrific sexual assault. Or that he was disqualified from working the Biden inauguration as a service member when one of his fellow soldiers told superiors that he constituted a threat to the incoming President’s safety. Or that time he almost de-armed a West Point drummer with an axe on live TV. But it turns out that all those things are merely the tip of a particularly drunken, sexually predatory, morally bankrupt iceberg.
“Apparently Pete’s a bit of a workaholic. In that at work, he’s an alcoholic.”
stephen colbert
“He has already been accused of a drunken sexual assault, and one newly released whistleblower report says that from 2013-2016 Hegseth was repeatedly intoxicated in his official capacity as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, including one episode where Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage at a Louisiana strip club. That is truly a sad and pathetic image but, fun fact, in a Louisiana strip club, the G in G-string stands for gumbo.”
stephen colbert
“According to the whistleblower, Hegseth and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, who they divided into two groups, the ‘party girls’ and the ‘not party girls.’ Eventually both groups became known as the ‘can we please work from home’ girls.”
stephen colbert
“But those allegations of course are all from coworkers, and Hegseth is a family man. And apparently they don’t like him either.”
stephen colbert
[On an email published last week where Hegseth’s own mother called him “an abuser of women” who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego”] “Sounds like somebody’s a not party girl.”
stephen colbert
Potpourri
“It is so cold today that I saw a squirrel in Central Park deep-frying his nuts.”
jimmy fallon
“Cyber Monday is followed by Giving Tuesday, and Stolen Amazon Package Wednesday.”
jimmy kimmel
“After Cyber Monday it’s Regret Ordering From Temu Tuesday. Then there’s Finally Find All the Captcha Images With Crosswalks Wednesday. Then Amazon Package Stolen Off Your Front Porch Friday, then Catch Your Neighbor Steve Wearing Your Scarf Saturday, and finally, Realize You Should Have Shopped Sober Sunday.”
jimmy fallon
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