On Tuesday, Jan. 7, in his first show back after a two-week holiday hiatus, Seth Meyers confessed a stark feeling of déjà vu. He and his writers had put together an entire script for his opening “A Closer Look” segment, recapping some of the big news they had missed during the vacation break, but had to junk it at the last minute and write a new one. Donald Trump had just held a press conference.
Almost exactly eight years earlier, Meyers related, he and his staff had to similarly shred another finished monologue, when Trump gave his first press conference as President. “This brings us,” Meyers announced, “to a segment called, ‘I Can’t Believe We’re [bleep] Doing This Again.’”
Deja-vu is hardly adequate to describe the predicament facing TV’s late-night comedians. For more than eight years they — network hosts like Meyers, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel, along with cable pundits like Bill Maher and John Oliver — have found in Trump the comedy gift that keeps on giving. With withering consistency, they have mocked his bluster and lies, his verbal tics and rambling speeches, his weird obsessions and overweening self-regard. Their jokes go viral on the web, provoke angry retorts from Trump, and have helped shape the national conversation in ways that I don’t think have been fully appreciated.
But can they possibly keep it up for another four years?
The evolution of the late-night comics from innocuous “topical” jokesters, in the Johnny Carson mold, to pointed political satirists has been a signal feature of the Trump era. Newspaper editorialists, investigative reporters, and MSNBC pundits can press the case against Trump with facts, political arguments, and legal analyses. But it’s the comedians who have really got to the heart of Trump’s craziness. They scour the video clips and social-media posts that even the news shows miss, highlighting his most brazen comments and unhinged moments — his odd vendetta against windmills, say, or his fetish for Hannibal Lector. Meyers — who has developed, for my money, the best, most acid Trump impression on TV — was the first to pinpoint the tell that Trump is making up an anecdote: people are always coming up to him with tears rolling down their cheeks and calling him “sir.”
After tragic events, like mass shootings, they drop the jokes altogether and become national grief counselors, delivering sober words of mourning — and calls for stricter gun laws. Early in Trump’s first term, a tearful Jimmy Kimmel turned his infant son’s life-threatening heart ailment into an emotional plea against Republican attempts to cut health-care funding. Last year two of them, Kimmel and Colbert, even hosted major fundraisers for the Democratic ticket.
And yet, judging by the results in November, none of it made a bit of difference. To be sure, they are joking largely to the converted — a lighthearted chaser following an evening of high dudgeon on MSNBC. Some of them (especially Colbert) have grown too comfortable in their TV-studio bubbles, tossing out insults like red meat to the cheering, like-minded studio audience.
This has made it easy for the right to dismiss them as just another branch of the hostile “deep state” — and for the left to expect their unwavering allegiance. When Jon Stewart (the pioneer of late-night political satire, who has made a welcome return to The Daily Show) poked fun at Biden’s doddering performance at a press conference early last year, he drew an outcry from many on the left. Bill Maher’s contrarian criticism of Democratic fecklessness and “woke” overreach on his HBO show Real Time has drawn similar umbrage. But both have been a healthy corrective to what can seem, too often, like smug partisan sniping.
So far, the late-night comics have given no sign of backing off. But some desperation may be showing. On inauguration day, Colbert mocked Trump’s decision to move the event indoors with taunting baby-talk: “Oh, was the big stwong gweatest Pwesident ever feeling a little chilly?” Kimmel’s offhand (and often very funny) baiting of Trump is getting a little too on the nose — his quip, for instance, on seeing Trump onstage with his favorite rock group: “The Village People and the village idiot, together at last.”
Meyers, as usual, manages to strike the best balance between bemusement and outrage. “Trump supporters are outside freezing, while Trump himself is inside cozying up to wealthy tech oligarchs,” he noted of the indoor inaugural. “I’m just going to sit here for a moment while you think about the metaphor.”
Indeed, with so much of the Trump resistance seemingly muted or in retreat, the comedians may have an even more vital role to play. Not as activists or advocates, but simply by hewing to a central tenet of the stand-up comedian’s mission. Whether complaining about blind dates, bad commercials, or a President’s crackpot ideas, they are the defenders of common sense, rational thinking, acceptable human behavior — exposing stupidity, nonsense, and pretension wherever they find it.
Trump, of course, has shifted the standards of acceptability so far off the charts, and unleashed so much nonsense in just his first week, that it’s easy to tune out in exasperation. The comedians are there to make sure we don’t. They help us keep our heads on straight, our feet on the ground, our equilibrium in a political world that has gone seriously out of whack.
It’s a tough job, a thankless one, maybe even (given Trump’s vows of revenge) a dangerous one. But it’s going to be a long four years, and the comedians may yet wind up having the last laugh.
Richard Zoglin 