The humor that worked best about Sunday’s second debate of the 2016 presidential campaign and about the revelations that preceded it was a humor of anger, even of astonishment.
Why, Samantha Bee wondered, were Republican officials only now waking up to “the idea that your petri dish of a political party allowed America’s misogyny and racism to coagulate into a presidential nominee?” (She’s talking about Donald Trump, in case you haven’t been following the election much, and, spoiler alert, these jokes mostly do not go well for Trump.)
How is it, John Oliver asked, that citizens were being asked to take seriously a debate featuring “the first female presidential nominee versus the human embodiment of every backwoods, condescending, ‘Mad Men’-esque boys club attitude as ever existed rolled into one giant salivating … warthog in a red power tie”?
“How has it come to this,” is a question that’s often implicit in what comedians have to say about the nation’s politics, and it has been asked especially often and ardently during this campaign. But on the best of Monday’s late-night shows, which had time to process both the debate and the release Friday of an 11-year-old recording featuring Republican nominee Donald Trump boasting of sexually abusing women, that question could be seen shifting from a stance to more of a desperate cry.
Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel on Monday tried to take the old politics-is-a-circus point of view, to play things a little more down the middle, and they just seemed lame. Fallon, on NBC’s “Tonight Show,” joked that it was a low point for Trump — not because he’d been captured saying a series of heinous things about his treatment of women, but because he’d done so while on a bus.
Kimmel pointed out that Trump overuses the word “disaster,” showing the dozen of more times he’d said it during his debate with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. “Someone on his team might want to think about investing in a thesaurus,” said the host of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
Yes, well, those are jokes, of a sort. They contain some truth. But when stacked next to the outrage — that’s the only word for it — we heard from Bee, Oliver (on his HBO show Sunday night), Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show” and Seth Meyers on “Late Night,” the Fallon and Kimmel monologues seemed more like a political posture, a ploy to deal with the latest news while alienating as few viewers as possible. (Stephen Colbert and James Corden, CBS’s late-night comics, are both in reruns this week.)
The others let their indignation flags fly, and because they were following a truth-telling impulse, rather than a ratings one, they delivered the better material about the debate and the backdrop against which it took place. Here is a sampling:
“We’re in a completely different world,” said Noah, arguing there was a politics before a major-party presidential nominee had talked about grabbing women by their private parts and now there is a politics after.
“I mentioned a year ago that Trump reminded me of an African dictator,” said Noah, who is from South Africa. Then, during Sunday’s debate, the Republican said if he is elected he will work to have Clinton thrown in prison. “Jailing your opponent is straight out of the African dictator playbook,” Noah said.
He and Bee pointed out the absurdity of Republicans citing their own wives and daughters as they finally backed away from Trump after his latest offenses against civility.
“Oh, go (bleep) yourselves,” said Bee, who was particularly good Monday during her show, “Full Frontal.” “Trump’s comments are not wrong because you have female relatives. … Trump’s comments are wrong because women are human.”
In the best line of the night, she listed Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s campaign-long series of rebukes of offensive Trump statements, none of them accompanied by Ryan revoking his endorsement of his party’s standard-bearer.
It’s a good thing Trump and Ryan did not appear together in Wisconsin over the weekend as had been planned, Bee said to Ryan, because “he wouldn’t have been able to resist grabbing a (expletive) like you.”
“In fact,” she said, “take a Tic Tac and grab ’em by the (expletive) is the closest thing to a plan Donald Trump has described this entire election.”
Most hosts took issue, too, with Trump’s defense that his comments were just locker-room banter. But Bee phrased it with the most potency: “You weren’t in a locker room, you sleazy pair of sweat socks,” she said. “You were at work.”
Meyers was sharp too.
“The man who is this close to the highest office in the land now occupies the lowest office in the land,” he said. “The pervert on the bus.”
Billy Bush was the then-host of an entertainment show who chuckled along on the recording with Trump’s boasts. “Bush could not be grabbed for comment,” Meyers said.
That’s a nice little bit of wordplay, but his next line about the host got at something much more profound, the reason, really, that Monday’s jokes had so much heat behind them.
In the recording’s wake, Bush had been relieved of his morning-show duties, Meyers pointed out, “which means there is currently a higher standard for host of the third hour of the ‘Today’ show than there is for Republican nominee for president.”
sajohnson@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
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