Late night has several major problems right now. The format is struggling to attract and maintain a younger audience, it’s hemorrhaging money and the President of the United States is committed to throwing tantrums and filing lawsuits against television programs and outlets that he perceives have wronged him.
But amid these larger structural crises late night faces, it also has a lesser-discussed joke problem. And no, not in the “late night shows are too political” way. Rather, in a “all four major shows make the same exact jokes every night” kind of way. Sure, the jokes vary in both quality and delivery, but the meat of them is more or less the same.
Part of this isn’t the late-night shows’ fault. It’s a problem all media is suffering from right now. Donald Trump sucks up all of the oxygen in every news cycle, doing and saying things so absurd, so out of the realm of normalcy, that it would feel like malpractice not to discuss his behavior.
Don’t Miss
Last night’s jokes, though, broke from this pattern. Admittedly, there was still a Trump-sized throughline between all of the monologues — no one, for example, could resist addressing Trump’s total lack of decorum when visiting with Japan’s Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi. But with so much ridiculous material available, each show decided to hone in on a slightly different angle.
On Colbert, that angle was Trump’s new military target (the American public), the high price of food, and blessedly, Fat Squirrel Week. “Here he is in plain English telling the military…,” Colbert said after playing a clip of Trump informing U.S. military members stationed in Japan that he planned to deploy the National Guard to more cities. Colbert couldn’t even finish his sentence before the audience broke out into a massive chorus of “boos.”
“Stuff like that’s going to get you invaded,” Colbert warned. “He’s telling the military he’s going to use them to invade America.”
Meanwhile, Kimmel differentiated himself from the other hosts by challenging Trump to an IQ test against Representatives Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “For whatever reason, fat Albert Einstein has been boasting that he would crush two House Democrats, two he does not like, AOC and Jasmine Crockett, both of whom he deems to be low IQ, in an IQ test,” Kimmel said. “And so I quite generously offered to host a competition between them to give our president the opportunity to show how much smarter he is than these women.”
Not a bad bit, but it really shines because it isn’t the same exact joke that Colbert told.
Even Fallon managed to separate himself from the pack, with a few jokes about Elon Musk. “I saw that Elon Musk just launched his own version of Wikipedia called Grokipedia. It’s not the worst name because someone already has the name MS NOW, so that’s fine,” Fallon quipped.
Again, not the best joke I’ve ever heard, but it’s also not the same tired Trump impression I’m guaranteed to get on the other late-night shows either.
Having noticeably different monologues might not save late night in its entirety, but it could make an argument as to why three different late-night shows need to exist in the same 11:35 p.m. time slot.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: feeds.feedburner.com
