Missed Thursday’s late-night monologues? We’ve got you covered with our round-up of the night’s best laughs from across the dial.
When You’re Too Sleazy for a Trump Administration…
It’s indicative of where some of us are mentally in this country that there was a palpable, almost springlike sense of joy today. That because one of the at least [checks notes] five Trump nominees for the highest seats of power in this land accused of sex crimes was forced to withdraw from consideration.
That should read “five that we know of,” but still, it was encouraging sign that at least former Florida Congressman and Trump-endorsed Attorney General pick Matt Gaetz (R-Lurking Under the Bleachers at Cheerleader Practice) will not in fact be the highest-ranking law enforcement official in America. USA! USA!
Yes, Gaetz removed himself from consideration after reporters reached out to his team for comment about a second allegation that he paid for sex with an underage girl (which is, by any legal definition rape, just so we’re on the same page). That only leaves Republican lawmakers with the task of confirming a guy who paid off the woman who filed a police report alleging he drugged and sexually assaulted her (Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth), the guy who allegedly tried to bribe a flight attendant with a horse after he exposed himself to her on his private jet (proposed government hatchet-oligarch Elon Musk), the guy who basically admitted to groping the family babysitter against her will (RFK Jr.) and the woman (yay, equality!) accused of helping her accused sexual predator husband cover up a WWE sex trafficking scandal involving young male employees. (Your Secretary of Education, everybody!)
Now some might say that a legally determined rapist facing dozens of sexual abuse allegations himself who has bragged about bursting into the dressing rooms of the teen beauty pageant he owned might not be the best choice to be nominating this unmarked van full of sex creeps in the first place. At any rate, Gaetz’s more-than-deserved public humiliation saw late-night hosts relishing a single post-election night where they could just smile, grip their joke-batons tightly, and gleefully beat the living hell out of the Matt Gaetz piñata.
“Matt Gaetz is out? But his nomination was only eight days old! Once again, he can’t even make it to 18.”
seth meyers
“So pour out a Capri Sun for one of the GOATs.”
desi lydic
“Gaetz said he was honored that Trump nominated him and he looks forward to spending more time posing as a high school senior on the Roblox Reddit page.”
jimmy kimmel
“This puts a lot of pressure on Trump because now there’s not a lot of time to find somebody worse.”
seth meyers
[On the alleged location of one of Gaetz’s underage sex crimes] “An air hockey table? Who was this sexual encounter with, Dave and Buster?”
stephen colbert
“That sounds cooling and refreshing. Way better than doing it on the Whac-A-Mole.”
stephen colbert
[On the report that the air hockey owner watched the whole thing] “Why on Earth are you watching? ‘Hold on [pulls quarter out of pocket] I got winner.'”
stephen colbert
[On Gaetz announcing his withdrawal minutes after CNN asked for comment about a second allegation that the AG pick had raped a child] “Oh my God, they asked him for a comment and his comment was, ‘I quit.’ This is like if the Mystery Gang showed up to a haunted amusement park and the first ghost they saw ripped off his mask and said, ‘All right, fine, you got me. It’s Matt Gaetz. Heyyy, and while I’m here, what’s your deal, Daphne?'”
seth meyers
“What a week Gaetz has had. He resigned from Congress, everyone talked non-stop about how he’s a sex criminal and a pedophile, and now he doesn’t even get to be Attorney General. This guy is f**ked so hard that he had to Venmo himself ten grand.”
desi lydic
[On the flow chart investigators used to track all the times Gaetz and his bros apparently used Venmo to pay women (and underage girls) for sex] “Look at that diagram. It looks like something you’d get back from 23 and Me, except it’s 17 and Me.”
seth meyers
“This chart connects all the characters in the Matt Gaetz Skinematic Universe.”
stephen colbert
[On Trump’s unsuccessful tele-bullying of Republican lawmakers in an attempt to save Gaetz] “The last time Trump made this many calls on behalf of an unqualified candidate was to get his son Eric into Georgetown.”
jimmy kimmel
“So far Trump hasn’t named a replacement but right now Rudy Giuliani is outside throwing pebbles at his bedroom window.”
jimmy fallon
“Poor Rudy Giuliani. He has to be on the twin bed in the office his son converted into a guest room right now going, ‘What about me?'”
jimmy kimmel
“This Gaetz situation is a setback for Trump but it’ll all be forgotten as soon as he nominates new Surgeon General, Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable.”
jimmy kimmel
[On MAGA sycophant and vocal anti-trans bigot Nancy’s Mace (R-SC)’s hypocrisy] “Yes, of course, you just want to protect women from hypothetical predators. That would play a lot better if you weren’t trying to get actual predators into the highest levels of government. Pete Hegseth, RFK, Matt Gaetz. If Donald Trump nominated Bill Cosby, Nancy Mace would be walking in circles in an ugly ’80’s sweater eating a pudding pop.”
desi lydic
Republicans From the Great State of Denial
But Donald Trump remains, in the eyes of GOP leaders, a blameless, holy creature. Sure, his Attorney General top pick resigned in disgrace for being a pedophile (allegedly), some 90 percent of his former cabinet members have denounced him as a dangerous, incompetent, Russia-owned moron, his other picks are, as Seth Meyers termed them, “a scandal-plagued army of business orcs and reality TV dufuses,” and he himself is a bankruptcy-prone, twice-impeached 34-time felon and adjudicated rapist but… where was I going with this?
Oh yeah, everyone in the Republican Party says everything is going fine.
[On Gaetz claiming he’s only withdrawing so as not to be a “distraction”] “That is true. All of the attention on this sex criminal was totally distracting from the work of all the other sex criminals who’ve been nominated. And elected.”
stephen colbert
[On Gaetz, Trump, and the MAGA sycophants on Fox assuring the faithful that perhaps Gaetz resigned because things were going great] “Yeah sure, dude. He dropped out because he was doing so well. This is the Jets holding a press conference to say they have plans for Super Bowl weekend. ‘Yeah, we’d love to come but we have a wedding. We can’t miss the wedding.'”
seth meyers
[On Trump sticking by his sex trafficker, claiming he’s excited to see all the things Matt Gaetz will do] “Oh, you want to watch all the great things Matt Gaetz will do? May I suggest you download the Citizen app.”
desi lydic
“Gaetz was not doing very well. He was doing the worst of all your cabinet picks, and that’s saying a lot. One of them dumped a bear carcass in Central Park and was investigated for cutting the head off a whale with a chainsaw. Another bragged in her memoir about murdering a dog, and the first guy was like, You gonna keep the body? Dead dog—I’d love to call dibs on the dead dog! And another, your nominee for Secretary of Defense, participated in a lumberjack battle on Fox News where he threw an axe on live TV and totally missed the target. Only Trump could see that and think, ‘He should be in charge of the military.'”
seth meyers
“Donald Trump is determined to fill his cabinet with not just clowns—demented sewer clowns. Stephen King clowns.”
jimmy kimmel
“It’s just that Gaetz was so egregious, no one had time for anything else. That’s the Trump playbook, just flood the zone with terrible choices so we don’t have the capacity to react to all of them. It’s like being the only security guard at a Best Buy on Black Friday whose bosses say, ‘Don’t let anybody get out of control, Dave.'”
seth meyers
“Only 3 in 10 Americans have favorable views of Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz, and Kristi Noem. Meaning they poll slightly below that thing where you bite the inside of your cheek and it forms a lump so you keep biting it all day by accident.”
stephen colbert
As part of their department of government effiiciency efforts, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy said yesterday they’re considering requiring federal employees to return to work in the office full time. Though if you want people to get up early, put on pants, and drive an hour to an office, I don’t think you know what efficiency means.”
seth meyers
“If anything, Gaetz dropping out should pave the way to focus on the other dangerous nominees. Like axe-man Pete Hegseth, who was also accused of sexual assault and who was flagged as a possible insider threat by a fellow service member. Or Dr. Oz, his nominee to run Medicare and Medicaid, who pushed quack treatments on TV and who owns stock in pharmaceutical companies. And of course RFK Jr., the world’s most famous hotel for brain worms, who has such a checkered past, he said this about himself at a campaign event. [Clip of Kennedy claiming, ‘I’ve got so many skeletons in my closet that if they could vote I’d be king of the world’] In fairness, they’re only skeletons because they refused to get vaccinated for measles.”
seth meyers
“Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley yesterday criticized president-elect Trump for selecting former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to serve as director of national intelligence and accused her of sympathizing with America’s adversaries. Well wait ’til she finds out who we elected president.”
seth meyers
Secretary of the Crapper
At least congressional Republicans are now freed up to take on the most pressing and impactful issued affecting real Americans. Wait, what’s that? Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC/Peeping Under the Stall Door) spent the last few days sweatily tweeting over 300 times attacking the first openly transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride (D-DE) for [checks notes] wanting to use the bathroom?
Yeah, that checks out. The modern GOP campaigns exclusively on three things: smooching Donald Trump’s orange ass, demonizing marginalized communities, and failing to actually do their jobs making people’s lives better. And boy oh boy, is Nancy Mace a modern Republican.
Posting non-stop about the fact that McBride and other trans Americans pose an existential threat to her for [checks notes further] having to pee, Mace has embarked upon the sort of bigoted crusade of pinched and hateful terror that would get her tossed out of any workplace in the country with a functioning HR department. McBride, for her part, has issued a mature and impossibly moderate response asserting her plan to ignore Mace and her discrimination while she works to serve the people who elected her. It’s almost like the Democratic woman is a dedicated and mature public servant and the Republican is a preening little toilet-creeper grandstanding for bigots’ attention instead of doing her job. Or something.
“Hmm, okay, forget about the economy. I guess the national mandate was making it harder for this one woman to poop at work.”
desi lydic
“Obviously, transphobic Cruella deVil’s logic might backfire here because all of her drama ironically is affirming Sarah McBride’s gender. There is nothing that defines the female experience more than starting a new job and a woman at work just decides she hates you.”
desi lydic
“What the f**k? 325 tweets? How can anyone else even use the bathroom when Mace is on the toilet tweeting all day?”
desi lydic
“I have never hated anything so much that I had to buy a new data plan.”
desi lydic
“Even Elon Musk was like, ‘Have you considered BlueSky?'”
desi lydic
[After clips from a few years ago showing Mace claiming to support the LGBTQ+ community] “Hmm, wonder what changed? I guess the biggest transition was Nancy Mace wanting to identify as the center of attention.”
desi lydic
We’re an American Scam!
Yes, Donald Trump is coming to your town, he’s gonna party down, and he’s gonna continue his side-hustle of hawking gaudy, Chinese-made crap. Next-up: $10,000 guitars.
“Now if you purchase one of these guitars, you are divorced. And if you say, ‘Actually Steve, I’m not divorced,’ well, go tell your spouse you just blew ten grand on a Trump guitar then call me back.”
stephen colbert
[On the MAGA musical instruments’ eagle-y, airbrushed chintzy glory] “Aw hell yeah ! It’s like if the side of your cousin’s van could play music.”
stephen colbert
Bananas
When you hear that someone successfully bid $6 million on an art piece made up of a single, actual banana duct taped to a white wall, you might be thinking, “It was a crypto bro, wasn’t it?”
And you’d be right!
But, hey, art is subjective. Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes and soup cans. Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. While it’s easy to sneer, art is about drawing viewers’ imagination to the inherent contradictions and complexities of human experience, and what is sneered at as effete hucksterism one decade will be hanging in the Louvre the next. So here’s to you, guy who just paid more than a hundred public school teachers’ salaries for a piece of produce! May your bold and courageous championing of the freedom of artistic experimentation carry you on to—annnnd, he’s going to eat it.
[On artist Maurizio Cattelan’s explanation for the work] “He said he did this as a satirical jab at market speculation. And it worked. I mean this whole time people have been investing in Apple, they should have been investing in banana.”
jimmy kimmel
“A crypto entrepreneur just bought an art piece of a duct-taped banana for over 6 million dollars. I mean, I know it sounds like a waste of money… ” [Moves on to next joke.]
jimmy fallon
[On the crypto bro in question, Justin Sun] “Justin says he looks forward to eating the banana in the coming days. He’s gonna slice it up and have it on his morning Picasso.”
jimmy kimmel
Potpourri
[On people dressing in costume at Wicked screenings] “Sure that’s okay, but when I go to see Conclave dressed as the pope, I’m being weird.”
jimmy fallon
“Kraft Mac & Cheese is offering a limited edition everything bagel flavor that will be sold exclusively at Walmart. Though you’re a stronger person than me if you can go into a Walmart that stoned.”
seth meyers
[On Minnie Mouse making her Macy’s Thanksgiving parade debut] “You go girl! She broke that glass ceiling and then she popped… because she is a balloon.”
stephen colbert
“A plane in Portugal was grounded for four days after 132 hamsters escaped from the cargo load. Originally it was just two hamsters but they were on their honeymoon.”
jimmy fallon
“The FBI launched an investigation yesterday into the recent burglaries of the homes of Kansas City Chiefs quarterbakc Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce. ‘But how else are we supposed to get a ring?,’ said the Jaguars.”
seth meyers
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