Click here if you’re having trouble viewing the videos below on a mobile device.
For the sharp-toothed comedians who prowl the grounds of late-night TV looking for prey, President Donald Trump this week was a veritable sitting duck.
One by one, they took their turns sinking their teeth into the tasty morsels that the president, earlier in the day, had laid out like a Vegas-style all-you-can-eat smorgasbord for our national comedy corps. Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Trevor Noah were champing at the bit from the moment Trump addressed the nation for his prime-time address from the Oval Office, goosing his fan base and outraging his critics, all with the same set of controversial and maybe just downright fake facts and figures about the “national crisis” unfolding at our southern border.
It was good timing on Trump’s part — for the comedians and their writers, lying in wait for the perfect moment to pounce.
For Colbert, that moment came at 11:35 p.m.
On “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” the host announced, “Trump’s address pre-empted our regularly scheduled CBS programming, ‘FBI,'” while a graphic of the crime drama “FBI” popped up on the screen. “Not the first time,” Colbert continued, that Trump has “interfered with an FBI investigation.”
There was more: “I think Trump gave that speech because he misses being on primetime television,” said Colbert to great laugher from his audience. He then impersonated the president as a guest on the entrepreneurial show “Shark Tank,” making a pitch for billions of dollars to fund his border wall.
Shortly after walking onto the set of his late-night show, Kimmel told his viewers that this wasn’t just another typical night in America.
“Our president tonight … addressed the nation from the Oval Office,” he said. “This was his first address from the Oval Office — up until now he had been using it exclusively for Kardashian meet-and-greets, but tonight he got very serious.”
Kimmel and his cohorts were talking about Trump’s dramatic appearance in the Oval Office, seated behind the Resolute desk for his first-ever prime-time televised address, a speech that The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker and Felicia Sonmez described as “a forceful and fact-challenged” plea. Looking into his teleprompter, the commander-in-chief warned the American people about a “growing humanitarian and security crisis” at our border with Mexico, suggesting that his border wall was the only way to fix the problem and the only way to get our partially shut down government un-shut.
“It was historic,” Kimmel said of the address. “Rarely does the president of the United States interrupt prime-time television to warn us about a completely made-up thing.”
Moments after Trump spoke, there was outrage from the other side of the aisle. Also televised for the whole country to see and hear. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded to Trump’s speech with their trademark sense of indignation, accusing Trump of spreading “misinformation” and running the country by “temper tantrum.”
Colbert kicked off his show with a cold open that riffed off of the hit Netflix thriller “Bird Box” about a mysterious force plaguing a civilization that makes people want to harm themselves. Colbert’s writers, though, came up with their own version of this dystopian world in which people need blindfolds for protection from a presidential speech that “will be so insane, if you watch it, you will want to hurt yourself.”
After saying thanks to his “warm-up act, Donald Trump, America’s favorite funny man,” Colbert joked that “by the time of this broadcast, we’re either in a brand new state of emergency or the same one we’ve been in since November of 2016.”
On Comedy Central, host Trevor Noah took his predictions about the speech beyond Trump’s remarks. After guessing the president would say the wall is needed “because there are Guatemalan drug-dealing Mexican Muslim terrorists trying to sneak into America to dance on rooftops with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” the “Daily Show” host shifted his focus to Trump’s appearance.
“I would also like to predict the color of spray tan that the president will choose to wear for the occasion,” Noah said, pausing to pull out a color chart of what appeared to be a range of four skin tones.
“Because it’s winter, he doesn’t want to go too dark,” Noah said. “But because it’s a formal event, he’ll need something with color … so I’m going to go with ‘Old Traffic Cone.'”
On Tuesday afternoon, long before Trump started his speech, “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” posted a survey on Twitter that asked people to vote for what skin-tone color they thought the president would use for his prime-time gig. While a majority voted for “Mango Salsa,” the show announced Tuesday night that Trump’s tone most closely matched the one Noah has guessed earlier:
Some of the comedy spilled off of the TV show and into the twittersphere. Throughout the speech, one post after another appeared on the Twitter account for Meyers’ show, “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” At one turn, the tweet-maker suggested that Trump’s address seemed more like a “Saturday Night Live” skit than a real-life presidential speech.
“Somebody please add ‘And live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!’ into the TelePrompTer,” one tweet read.
Somebody please add “and live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” into the TelePrompTer.
— Late Night with Seth Meyers (@LateNightSeth) January 9, 2019
