Saturday Night Live, too, is no longer calling on Alec Baldwin for his much ballyhooed and overdone Trump impressions, but has continued its cold-open political parodies in the Biden era to middling interest. Still others, from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah to the weekly programs with the time and mandate to dig deeper into less reactive topics, have barely mentioned Trump as they tackle thornier, more complicated material – vaccine hesitancy, bitcoin, anti-abortion laws, extreme weather, even, on the Daily Show, an explainer of how Nicki Minaj’s misinformation-filled viral tweet about her cousin’s friend in Trinidad burdened Covid defense efforts in that country.
(Kimmel even controversially hosted a frequent target, the MyPillow CEO and election conspiracist Mike Lindell, for an interview in April.) Others, namely Late Night with Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, have doubled down – continuing to mock Trump and his supporters, keeping up with the goings on of his former confidants (Rudy Giuliani, Kellyanne Conway), and stoking outrage over his attempts to remain relevant without social media and the nation’s highest office.
Shows such Stephen Colbert’s Late Show have taken to openly avoiding the name of the former president while repeatedly skewering the Republican party now crafted in his image. There have been earnest and haphazard attempts to move forward and refocus, but like the current administration, late-night comedy remains haunted by the last one. How programs as disparate in pace, template and tone as The Tonight Show and Last Week with John Oliver have handled the past year of turbulence and transition, however, has varied. So on some level, political comedy aimed at relevance couldn’t completely avoid the former president. The playbook haphazardly invoked by the Trump campaign to disenfranchise minority voters and discredit elections has been codified into law in several states. The courts stacked with conservative justices during his administration continue to make (or abstain from making) decisions crucial to millions of Americans’ lives. There was his big lie of election fraud and the insurrection of the Capitol on 6 January, fallout from which still peppers late-night comedy as a Republican party now tethered to the tenets of Trumpism – denial, fearmongering, minority rule – refuses to hold anyone officially accountable. Of course, the former president’s relevance to topical comedy didn’t end with his defeat in the 2020 election. Where would one of the most consistent and least diverse genres of variety television find itself when the outrageous presidency ended? Four years of bad impressions and too-similar jokes exposing the limits of satire one night in 2018, five late-night hosts told the same one. “Putin and I are, as they say in ancient Japan, Eskimo brothers,” said Seagal.It also tested the definition of insanity, stranding writers and hosts in a rut of stale jokes about an administration beyond parody. Enter Steven Seagal (Bowen Yang, hilarious), Putin’s puffy pal and arguably the most reviled SNL host in the show’s history. The phone lines, meanwhile, were operated by none other than former president Trump (James Austin Johnson), who seemed far more interested in rambling about Rihanna’s pregnancy, Biden, burgers, and the Fresh Prince reboot than the matter at hand. SNL’s Kate McKinnon Rips Apart Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill: ‘I Am Deeply Gay’ Who will pour vodka in their mouths? So many horny mouths to feed!” pleaded Ingraham. With that, the demented duo revealed that the special was to “raise money for the real victims of the invasion: the oligarchs.” “We need to think about babies-their sugar babies. Not to be outdone, Carlson countered, “I kept saying we should be more worried about our own border getting invaded by Mexico-but in my defense, I am racist, so I thought that was true.” He stayed and fought with his people in the war, and I called him pathetic from a news desk in Washington,” added Ingraham. “And I called the president of Ukraine pathetic.
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