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.
Putting the Ass in Assassinate
In his traditional Monday Daily Show drop-by Jon Stewart went on at length this week exposing the GOP/Fox News victimhood complex. You know, the tendency for rich white conservatives to manipulatively manufacture controversies that they are facing insidious, widespread prejudice and existential threats where none actually exist. Well, Donald Trump’s supporters found a real doozy this week, as their chosen leader seized upon a supposed “shoot to kill” order contained in the 2022 search warrant for Trump’s Florida golf club and classified documents repository, Mar-a-Lago. Except that—and this may shock you—the guidelines about “use of deadly force” in the legal document is boilerplate FBI language used in every search warrant. (Including, as rational heads dutifully produced, on the very same search warrant used to search President Biden’s home that same year.)
But privileged right-wingers gonna privileged right-wing, and so a Trump fundraising email was quickly dispatched claiming that this boring standard document proved that the Deep State was out to literally murder one Donald J. Trump. MAGA minions like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Steve Bannon applied their well-worn frenzy-whips to fear-monger the gullible and conspiracy-minded, and yet, somehow, Donald Trump continued to walk the earth un-assassinated as of late-night monologue time. The Daily Show’s Michael Kosta mocked the farcical hyperbole, noting, “”Holy sh*t! ‘Locked and loaded?’ ‘Ready to take me out?’ I’ve never heard Joe Biden sound so f**king cool in my life.”
“I always thought of Biden as a doddering old man, but Trump makes him look like one of The Expendables. ‘The rest of you take what you want, but leave the Orange Man to me.'”
michael kosta
“Despite the fact that this is perfectly normal, Republicans are claiming that the FBI was ready to assassinate Donald Trump. In fact, Trump already sent out this fundraising email to his cult members: ‘They were authorized to shoot me! I nearly escaped death.’ I’m sorry, you nearly escaped death? Which means you didn’t? ‘That’s right, I almost made it out alive. Now I’m fundraising from heaven, which for some reason is very, very hot. And there’s nobody around here but my dear old friend, Jeffrey Epstein.'”
stephen colbert
[On a hyperbolic Newsmax host exhorting viewers to pray in response to the nonexistent plot] “We will pray—that someday you are able to experience an emotion called shame.”
jimmy kimmel
Fear of a Gay Planet
Stephen Colbert noted in his monologue that it has now been nine years since the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in the landmark case Obergefell v. Hodges. A lot has changed in that time (for one thing, this MAGA-packed SCOTUS appears terrifyingly poised to undermine or even overturn that decision), but one thing remains very much the same. As noted in the entry above, conservatives love nothing more than hyping up supposed threats to “traditional values” with nonsensical scare tactics. As Colbert noted concerning a recent study showing that conservatives’ ginned-up warnings about the death of the institution of marriage have come to nothing: “Well, duh! Everyone knew that at the time. It’s like announcing, ‘New study finds making love to wife doesn’t get neighbor pregnant.'”
[On the same study showing that same-sex weddings have actually increased people’s positive regard for all marriage] “And that makes sense. Once gay people get into something it always becomes a trend. Like RuPaul’s Drag Race, the music of Lady Gaga, or dressing like you have a shred of self-respect.”
stephen colbert
[On the right-wing’s predictable freakout over Peacock’s upcoming nature special, Queer Planet] “This is fun and this is joyful, so conservatives are having a total meltdown over it, with one right-wing Twitter user calling it ‘science revisionism for a satanic gay agenda,’ and another groused, ‘If animals were indeed gay there would be no more animals.’ Yes! So true. Just like how, because some people are gay, there are no more people.”
stephen colbert
Hide and Secrets
With Donald Trump’s hush money/campaign and business fraud trial is heading to the jury, hosts recognized they had no time to rest. The former Republican President still facing election interference trials (translation: leading a coup) both nationally and in the state of Georgia, and then there’s the classified documents case, where Trump used his golf resort’s crapper as a storage unit for top secret government information. Well, that last trial got a little spicier this week as unsealed documents showed that Trump was still strewing state secrets all over Mar-a-Lago some four months after the initial raid on the place, that staffers were scanning top secret files onto an unsecured laptop, and that Trump directed employees on how to scurry past the golf club’s security cameras without being seen while hauling stacks of—you guessed it—classified documents.
As Stephen Colbert put it in looking down the road to an unending string of Donald Trump criminal trials, “We’ve been talking about Donald Trump’s hush money trial for five weeks now. Right? And I for one am thrilled that he’s not in court today so that we can talk about anything else—like Donald Trump classified documents trial!”
“We also learned that Mar-a-Lardo had stolen documents in his bedroom, in his bathroom, and scattered around on the floor. Basically he had documents everywhere Shaggy got caught having sex in the song ‘It Wasn’t Me.'”
jimmy kimmel
“Remember the classified documents case? When the nuclear codes [were] offered as one of the toppings at Mar-a-Lago’s waffle bar?”
stephen colbert
“The Special Counsel believes that Trump did even more to obstruct the investigation than we’ve previously known. It looks like Trump moved the boxes of classified documents out of Mar-a-Lago and then realized he had to move them back in without it being captured on security cameras. [Shows photo] This is Trump’s right-hand man, Walt Nauta, moving large boxes. Or to be fair, this could have been Trump’s lunch order.”
jimmy kimmel
“That’s never a good sign. No one ever says, ‘Take these toy donations to the orphanage—and avoid security cameras.'”
stephen colbert
“The lawyers knew Trump was hiding something when they saw a box labeled ‘books.'”
jimmy fallon
“That scandal is exactly much worse than we could have thought, because we just learned that his lawyers found classified documents in Donald Trump’s bedroom four months after the search of Mar-a-Lago.Oh my God, the only thing more shocking to find in Donald Trump’s bedroom would be a current wife.”
stephen colbert
It’s the Economy, Stupid—Seriously, We’re Stupid
Polling has become an increasingly contentious election-time practice. Maybe it’s because, with the almost complete disappearance of landlines and the fact that cell phone users automatically ignore unknown phone numbers, the pool of potential question-answerers has shrunk to a tiny, rapidly aging puddle. Toss in a decline in actual news reader- and viewership, the corrosive reports from alternate universe that is right-wing media, and the fact that Donald Trump’s latest incendiary post-court press conferences get far more internet clicks, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. Regardless of the reason however, the fact that a recent poll showed that an alarming number of American potential voters had almost the exact opposite opinion of the current economy under Joe Biden from the historically booming reality was still pretty discouraging.
As The Daily Show‘s Michael Kosta explained, “So just to summarize, we think the economy is shrinking when it’s actually growing, that the stock market is down when it’s actually up, and that unemployment is at a 50-year high when it’s actually near a 50-year low. But we do know that Bennifer’s on the rocks, so we’re not completely pathetic.”
“But you have to remember, these are not surveys of America… these are surveys of Americans who are willing to talk to a stranger who cold-calls them in the middle of a workday.”
michael kosta
“It might just be me, but maybe we, as a society, shouldn’t have replaced newspapers with dudes ranting in cars?”
michael kosta
“Look, in a way, I get it. People don’t judge the economy based on data. They’re like, ‘You say the GDP is up but I say I used to be on my cousin’s Netflix account and now I have to get my own. So yeah, Jerome Powell, we’re in a recession, okay?'”
michael kosta
Potpourri
[On independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s strategy of targeting so called “Reddit ape” online investors] “Now you might think it’s weird for RFK Jr to be going after this tiny little specific group. But don’t forget, America is just a bunch of tiny little specific groups. First he gets the Reddit apes, then he gets the furries, then the tradwives, cottagecore, TikTok, Disney adults, JetBlue frequent fliers with Mosaic Elite status, and then the next thing you know it’s January and he’s giving the State of the Union from Burning Man.”
michael kosta
“A fire broke out in a Tesla factory in California that started in an oven. Luckily, it’s a Tesla factory so the fire department was already there.”
jimmy fallon
“Earlier this week, Trump’s social media account put out a bit of disturbing content. It was a campaign video with a headline about a ‘Unified Reich.’ Now before you get too worked up, there’s a simple explanation. Donald Trump wants to rule over a unified reich.”
stephen colbert
“The Trump campaign just announced that they’re now accepting donations in cryptocurrency.Not to be outdone, President Biden announced that he’s now accepting donations in Werther’s Originals and ear-quarters.”
jimmy fallon
“What the f**k is going on here? Someone sent blood the RNC. I guess it could just be Rudy Giuliani’s lunch order.”
michael kosta
“Sexually transmitted infections have been around for a very long time. In fact, researchers from Brazil just released newly discovered evidence. They tested bones from skeletons and found that Neanderthals had an ancient form of herpes. Either that or the night watchman at the museum has some explaining to do.”
jimmy kimmel
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