
Missed Wednesday’s late-night monologues? We’ve got you covered with our round-up of the night’s best laughs from across the dial.
Cope and Rage
With just six days before an election that will literally determine whether we can all go back to relative if stressful normalcy or will spend the next years of our lives acting out the plot of The Empire Strikes Back, late-night hosts were all about staying focused and staying calm. In the sense that they expressed their pent-up, helpless anxiety about the possible end of American democracy at the hands of a cabal of crypto oligarchs, fundamentalist zealots, and a mail-order steak salesman Russian stooge with all the desperate, madness-tinged laughter of people who just spotted Cthulhu rising from the inky blackness of the ocean’s abyss.
Seth Meyers attempted to reassure viewers the best he could about this appallingly too-close-to-call contest between a twice-impeached convicted felon and sex criminal who attempted a literal violent coup the last time he lost, and a decent career politician articulating a coherent plan for a more just and pluralistic nation. For those of us in the same boat, his summation is worth a read as he notes, “Trump is not inevitable. Don’t let yourself feel that way. He fell ass-backwards into the presidency one time despite losing the popular vote by 3 million. And he and his MAGA minions have been routed in election after election since then. He’s not some unstoppable juggernaut. He’s sleepily rambling about grievances to half-empty arenas while Kamala Harris draws record crowds to outline her policy agenda.”
But then there’s his opener:
“Last time I was this excited for something to be over there was still an hour left in Return of the King. And look, I know that’s a completely unnecessary side-burn on an Oscar winning Lord of the Rings movie that came out 21 years ago, but just let me have this, okay? I’m stressed and I’m on edge and I can’t take out my anger on anyone, so I’m gonna take it out on the hobbits. Because, guys, I already voted and that didn’t help, so I keep scrolling for new polls every day and every day they just say the same f**king thing—’Tied, tied, and, ooh, she’s only down 5 in Texas! No! Get that out of your head! Tied, tied.’ Then finally it seems like the MSG rally’s breaking through and maybe that will tip the scales and then Joe Biden opens his mouth and causes a kerfuffle, and the White House puts out a transcript to correct the record and we all have to decipher it like we’re reading hieroglyphics though a jeweler’s loupe. And we don’t know what he said and we don’t know who’s gonna win and we don’t know if democracy will survive or if a man too dumb to close an umbrella will once again be in charge of the nation’s nuclear arsenal and the only thing we can know for sure is that The Return of the King had too many endings!”
seth meyers
“Yeah everyone is stressed about the election. Over the weekend I went to a fall festival and bobbed for Xanax in a bottle of Pepto.”
jimmy fallon
“At times like this it’s important to realize that cannabis is legal in our state.”
jimmy kimmel
If you can vote early, vote early. If you can’t vote early, vote on time. If you wanna vote for Trump, vote late, vote very late.”
jimmy kimmel
“This will be my third time voting against Donald Trump. Fifth if you count the two times he was nominated for an Emmy for reality show host.”
jimmy kimmel
“This has been ‘Seth Loses It Because His Therapist Was on Vacation This Week.’ Hope the leaf-peeping was a success, Dave!”
seth meyers
Can’t Spell ‘Grasping Hypocrisy” Without ‘GOP’
In case you were wondering what Meyers was referring to mid-breakdown, Joe Biden made a possible slip of the tongue on a Zoom appearance on Tuesday in which he appeared to call Trump supporters ‘garbage.’ And while the 81 year-old outgoing President wasn’t super-clear, the context suggests he was refuting the Trump-fluffing “comedian” who called Puerto Rico a floating garbage island and not making his own HIllary Clinton “basket of deplorables” condemnation of the MAGA faithful.
But, as hosts (and people who write about hosts) point out—who the f**k cares? Joe BIden isn’t the candidate any more, Donald Trump routinely calls the entire country “a garbage can” and his opponents “vermin,” “scum,” and “evil,” his Madison Square Garden speakers called Kamala Harris everything from a sex worker to the antichrist (and aforementioned Clinton ” a sick son of a bitch”) when not specifically quoting Adolph Hitler, and his supporters’ “F**k you, Biden” bumper stickers have only recently been papered over with ones calling the female Democratic candidate for president a “ho.” So, yeah, garbage doesn’t like being called garbage, even when nobody actually called them garbage in the first place.
Luckily, our news media has learned a hard lesson over the last nine years of Donald Trump’s well-worn tactic of flooding the zone with bad-faith nonsense to distract from not only his own reprehensible bigotry, cruelty, and middle school insults but the dangerous policies he’s actually plotting. Oh, wait, no—the news all but ignored the real issues in the race to take the MAGA bait and focus on an old man flubbing a line on the computer-box. My bad.
[On Trump supporters’ performative outrage] “I don’t blame them, it’s not a smart thing to say. Joe Biden should drop out of this race immediately.”
jimmy kimmel
[On the White House putting out an explanation of the grammatical meaning of Biden’s remark] “That’s right. In the last week of the campaign, Republicans are calling for a round-up of immigrants and Democrats are like, ‘You have to put the apostrophe in the right place.'”
ronny chieng
“This election is really coming down to Nazis and grammar Nazis.”
ronny chieng
“If Democrats are relying on Americans to know how apostrophes work, then this election is f**ked. Because have you ever seen a sign outside a bar? I mean, they basically use an apostrophe to mean, ‘Here comes an S.'”
ronny chieng
[After clips of Donald Trump repeatedly calling America the exact same insult Biden is accused of using] “That’s your closing argument? Aren’t you supposed to be the America First candidate? ‘We love America, don’t we folks, it’s a garbage can. Not one of those nice simplehuman garbage cans from Bed Bath and Beyond, it’s the kind of garbage can that hobos light on fire and stand around. The kind with the little metal handles that you can barely fit through.'”
seth meyers
[On Marco Rubio rushing breathlessly to tell Trump at a rally about what Biden said] “Oh my stars. What kind of language is that to use? He’s like an excited little Minion bringing big news to Gru.”
jimmy kimmel
[After clips of 2016 candidate Rubio insulting Trump, calling him a con man and saying “he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy”] ” And he would know, he’s a little guy he stuck it to pretty hard.”
jimmy kimmel
[After montage of those Trump MSG speakers’ insutls about Kamala Harris, Democrats, and anyone else not kissing Trump’s shoes] “There’s no defense that those were jokes. Those weren’t jokes, they were beliefs. And Donald Trump has said not one word about them because that’s what he believes too, and that is deeply vile.”
seth meyers
[On Trump refusing to accept responsibility for the racist “comedian” his campaign vetted and sent out to open Trump own Madison Square garden rally] “The amount this man won’t take responsibility for anything with his name on it is almost impressive. Like President Truman said, ‘The buck stops here.’ Trump is like, ‘I never saw that buck, I never met that buck. And even when you show him a picture of him with the buck he says, I go to a lot of stag parties.'”
seth meyers
[On the doctored photo of a smiling Trump with his arm around a stag for the previous joke] “That’s not fair, by the way, we photoshopped, obviously in that deer. Here’s the original picture. [Reveal that it’s actually a photo of Trump and deceased Trump wingman and pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein] I thought it was fair to show you the original picture.”
seth meyers
[On Trump’s photo op cosplaying as a garbage man] “He’s driving a garbage truck. He went out and rented a garbage truck and put his name on the side. Shouldn’t they have put him in the back of that?”
jimmy kimmel
Kamala Malls Trump
While the press was devoting precious pre-election airtime to a non-scandal about a lame duck President not saying something, Kamala Harris steamed right ahead stealing Donald Trump’s thunder. A rally on Tuesday at Washington D.C. space The Ellipse saw Harris draw some 75,000 supporters to hear a speech ringing with calls for unity, honest political discourse, and policy proposals aimed at helping as many Americans as possible. Oh, and she also never once rambled on about someone’s penis size or swayed to music in a fugue state for 40 minutes.
Hosts pointed out the canny Harris campaign move of holding this final call to voters at the exact same spot where Donald Trump infamously hyped up his assembled mob of gullible yahoos and violence-ready fascist thugs on January 6, even if Trump, himself holding a relatively ill-attended rally of die hard MAGA cultists in Pennsylvania, was likely only stung by his ongoing, deeply telling obsession with crowd size. (Harris’ rousing appearance pulled some 22 thousand more people than Trump’s 2020 pre-coup pep talk.)
As Stephen Colbert’s Trump complained, “Look, mine just looked smaller because it was January, and you know how the cold gives a big crowd the shrinky-dinks.”
[On Trump claiming that Harris only drew such a massive crowd because her campign was “bussing them in”] “My dude, look at the shots from your Atlanta rally and look at her speech in D.C. I guess the bus doesn’t stop in Atlanta?”
seth meyers
“Kamala must have hired a lot of buses because there were 75 thousand ‘nobodies’ at her rally last night. It’s the most crowded bus stop that I’ve ever seen.”
jimmy kimmel
“But the big story of this election is Kamala Harris going down to Washington last night where she delivered a speech specifically designed to purple Trump’s nurple. ‘Cause Harris gave it at The Ellipse, the same place Donald Trump held his ‘let’s go beat up some cops’ rally on January 6.”
stephen colbert
“75 thousand is 22 thousand more than showed up for Trump’s rally on that same spot on January 6. And the craziest part is, when she was done speaking, they all just went home.”
jimmy kimmel
[On Harris contrasting her unifying “linking arms” message with Trump’s constant finger-pointing] “Yeah, F**k you, fingers, it’s arm time.”
ronny chieng
“You know, when you find yourself having to tell people ‘I’m not Hitler,’ something is wrong.”
jimmy kimmel
[On the Harris campaign seemingly trolling Trump by playing “YMCA”] “‘Nuh-uh, that is my song. Now the Democrats have it and you know they’re gonna turn it into some kind of gay anthem.'”
stephen colbert
“But of course Donald Trump wants this campaign to keep going, this is the part he likes. Everyone else is miserable but he’s having the time of his life. I have no doubt that if we could appoint him to a completely powerless position called Campaigner in Chief and let him just go state to state sleepily rambling to half-filled basketball arenas about Hannibal Lecter and toilets that don’t flush and windmills killing birds, our long national nightmare would be over.”
seth meyers
“Because once the campaign ends, Donald Trump’s life becomes miserable again. You know, either he actually becomes President, a job he hates and is terrible at, or he has to go back to falling asleep in courtrooms and facing the prospect of jail time while sketch artists draw the most unflattering portraits of him that have ever been drawn.”
seth meyers
[On footage of another Trump crowd—this time in Michigan—fleeing his rally after Trump was three hours late] “I don’t blame them. There is nothing I would wait three hours to see. One time I took my kids to the mall to take pictures with Santa and the sign said wait time 90 minutes and I just turned to them and said, ‘Santa’s not real.'”
seth meyers
When You’ve Lost the Meathead Vote
Donald Trump continues to cancel public speaking appearances at a rate that would be front page news if our corporate media weren’t controlled by a tiny cabal of billionaires scuttling negative coverage of the guy they’re in business with and the press corps weren’t as easily distracted as infants who see some dangling keys.
One appointment Trump did keep was with podcasting maven and “I’m just asking questions” idiot Joe Rogan. And while Rogan did his best to prop up his doddering guest, even he had to effortfully keep steering Trump back toward some vicinity of the points he was trying to make.
“I love how Rogan starts, ‘I’m not gonna cut you off,’ and then 10 seconds later, he’s like, ‘I’m gonna have to cut this f**ker off.'”
seth meyers
[Giving Rogan credit for asking why Trump hasn’t presented any of his so-called airtight evidence of election fraud] “‘Are you ever going to present this, ever,’ is a great question, especially when Trump lost roughly 60 court cases challenging the legitimacy of the election. No one who has evidence to support their case chooses not to present it. There’s no legal strategy called rope-a-dope, where you lose the first 60 and then right when they relax, pow!”
seth meyers
[On Trump babbling that he has “papers” all ready to prove the thing he’s been lying about for four years] “60 cases and you never brought in the papers? ‘So many papers, all different shapes and sizes. We had little note cards, giant posters, and photo paper, copy paper, tissue paper, construction paper. Which is great because it comes in different colors but Joe, Joe, you have to be careful with the black paper because if you write with black crayon you can’t see anything and that’s what happened with my evidence of voter fraud.'”
seth meyers
[On Trump, after rambling about whales and windmills for en eternity, mused to Rogan that he would like to be “a whale psychologist”] “My man, go for it. Follow your dreams. Follow that dream. Because if you would drop out, I would make that trade right now. I always say that Dr. Melfi and Tony Soprano was the best therapy ever on TV but if Trump was sitting across from a beluga whale on a couch, I would watch the sh*t out of that.”
seth meyers
Only the Best Worm Food
An overlooked horror looming over the prospect of another Trump administration is his promise to put some completely unqualified, dangerously loony fringe bong-bongs in charge of some incredibly important government agencies. Apart from Elon Musk being assigned to some nebulous “cost cutting” duties that would, in Musk’s own estimate, lead to a stock market crash and some “hardship” for us poors to endure, Trump has also pledged to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of literally everything to do with public health.
Yeah, that RFK, Jr.
Well, to be fair, with House Speaker and guy who shares his abstinence alert iPhone porn alarm with his teenage son Mike Johnson, a second Trump administration will finally kill the Affordable Care act, so nobody will be able to go to the doctor anyway.
“RFK Jr. is actually pretty healthy. I mean, he’s 70 years old, and that’s like 850 in Kennedy years.”
ronny chieng
[On Kennedy being promised oversight of the FDA] “How is this guy gonna be in charge of food quality. I mean they found a dead worm in his brain. So even his skull can’t get a higher rating than a C.”
ronny chieng
“Of all the characters in this election, this guy is the scariest. Because he doesn’t believe in vaccines or pasteurizing milk, he thinks that antidepressants cause school shootings and that Covid was engineered to not affect Jews, and he thinks chemicals in the water make kids trans. And Trump is gonna put him in charge of all the health and food and medicine. I mean at least Trump will put some limits on what he’s gonna do, right? I mean, Donald, you’re not gonna let this guy go wild are you? [Clip of Trump claiming, ‘I’m gonna let him go wild on health’] Wait, how are you gonna let him go wild on medicine? Like, are you gonna let him dip his balls in the cough syrup?”
ronny chieng
Uncomfortably Musky
Amidst all the news about “Donald Trump’s private pet billionaire” (Colbert’s words) being under criminal investigation for trying to bribe voters with oversized Happy Gilmore checks, using his Nazi-infested social media site to flood the infosphere with MAGA misinformation, openly plotting to tank the U.S. economy for his own benefit if Trump wins, and shipping his deceived and exploited door-knockers for Trump around in unsafe U-Haul trailers, it’s tempting to forget just how undeniably creepy the guy is.
You know, like how he’s currently shopping his reproductive material out to anyone in range and is planning to gather up all the ex-wives and children who are still talking to him at a secret gated compound somewhere in Texas. A billionaire weirdo secluding himself with a gaggle of women and children who’s obsessed with propagating the species and obsessing about his semen—what could possibly be worrying about that?
We shall now pause for readers to repress their gag reflexes.
[On reports that Musk is “offering people his sperm”] “I cannot emphasize this enough, do not trick-or-treat at Elon’s house.”
stephen colbert
“The news may affect the race because Musk is one of Trump largest donors—of money.”
stephen colbert
[On Musk’s explanation that this is all about declining birth rates] “Elon, I’m not sure women would agree that the reason behind declining birth rates is, ‘There’s just not enough sperm out there.'”
stephen colbert
[On reports that Musk is offering his—repressed gag—sperm to “friends and acquaintances”] “So a warning to Elon’s friends and acquaintances, that’s not sourdough starter.”
stephen colbert
“And you know a story is always gonna end well when it starts with ‘a compound in Texas.'”
stephen colbert
Yankees Fans: The Real Garbage
In Tuesday night’s Game Four of the World Series, two Yankees fans attempted to physically wrench a caught foul ball from the mitt of Dodgers outfielder Mookie Betts, in a move that should surprise nobody. It was still pretty jarring to see an attempted mugging on live national television, and hosts were all over the broadcast display of New York stereotypes come to life. Even though the batter was called out and the fans in question were ejected and told that their season tickets were yanked for the rest of the Series, that didn’t stop the gags, as when Stephen Colbert saw a loudmouthed Yankee fan purporting to be the chief ball thief interrupt his monologue.
You can dress a Yankees fan up in his too-tight oversized game jersey, but you can’t trust him not to be a Yankees fan, is the lesson.
“They call that the Staten Island handshake. Mookie vs. the mooks.”
jimmy kimmel
[After a Yankees announcer laughed off the attempted assault by saying, “A for effort”] “Yeah, A for effort. Also A for a-hole.”
stephen colbert
“They’ve identified the guy. His name is Austin Capobianco. He’s a neurosurgical oncologist—no , he sells restaurant supplies.”
jimmy kimmel
Potpourri
“The election is taking over everything. Even Halloween. Tomorrow if you see someone wearing a bunch of eyeliner it’s either Jack Sparrow of sexy J.D. Vance.”
jimmy fallon
“Jaywalking has been legalized in New York City. To which New Yorkers were like, ‘Wait, jaywalking was illegal? But it’s still okay to shave my legs in the space between the moving subway cars, right?'”
stephen colbert
“As one city council member said, ‘Let’s be real, every New Yorker jaywalks.’ Yeah, that’s why the crosswalk signal options in this city are walking man and ‘Munch my balls, Citibike!'”
stephen colbert
“Former President Trump and his team are already making unfounded election fraud claims in Pennsylvania. Trump’s election fraud claims are like the holidays. Every year it feels like they happen earlier and earlier.”
jimmy fallon
Receive our daily monologue round-ups via email: sign up here.