Alex Christy is the Media Research Center’s resident comedy cop, attacking the political bias of late-night TV hosts (though never Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld), and he was still at it as the year started to wind down. He spent an Oct. 26 post complaining that the hosts weren’t sufficiently making fun of indicted Sen. Bob Menendez:
In the first three weeks after the writers’ strike, the late night joke tellers picked right back up where they left off: telling Trump jokes at the expense of almost everything else, a NewsBusters study has found.
An examination of all jokes told on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show has found that from Monday, October 2 through Friday, October 20, the men of late night told 247 jokes about Donald Trump over the course of 42 shows.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden was the target of 45 jokes, mostly about his age. That equates to 85 percent of the jokes between the top two presidential candidates being directed towards the Republican.
They steered around comedy gold mines in Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez’s corruption scandal and Rep. Jamaal Bowman pulling a Congressional fire alarm. At the same time, jokes about first-term Republican Rep. George Santos and his legal predicament received noticeably more jokes — 72 jokes — as President Joe Biden despite the story only being in the news for the second week.
[…]Comedy is partly about finding and pointing the absurdities in life and the subversion of expectations and what could be more absurd than the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee being an alleged foreign agent and Googling how much a one-kilogram gold bar is worth after he received gold bars as part of an alleged bribe or a congressman pulling the fire alarm? Instead, we get the same Trump and Santos jokes over and over… and over again.
Christy failed to acknowledge that there’s a significant difference between Menendez — a senator from a smallish state — and Trump, a former president whose crimes are quite ostentatious. Christy only wants to see things through the partisan prism he’s been inculcated with at the MRC, so he can’t fathom the relative lack of jokes about Menendez as the result of anything other than deliberate partisan intent. Unsurprisingly, he also deliberately excluded Gutfeld from his study.
Toward the end of the year, Christy did get a bit of assistance. Christian Toto spent his Dec. 16 column complaining that “Saturday Night Live” and other late-night hosts weren’t making fun of anti-Semitism:
“SNL’s” satirical swing and miss drew plenty of unwanted attention, including some misguided calls for an apology. It’s still better, albeit barely, than the virtual silence heard from Team Late Night.
How many times have Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver or Seth Meyers mocked progressives tearing down hostage posters of innocent Israelis or violent pro-Hamas protests?
What about the rotating guest hosts at “The Daily Show?”
Have any skewered the Ivy League leaders for the moral rot they shared on Dec. 5?
Bill Maher’s HBO showcase remains an exception. The “Real Time with Bill Maher” host has been vocal on the subject. Here, he taunts both the Ivy League presidents and their free speech hypocrisy.
[…]Let’s be clear. Mocking presidents like Donald Trump or Joe Biden is easy (even if comedians rarely touch Biden or trot out stale, old-age barbs). Eviscerating Jew hatred requires a deft touch.
The wrong phrasing could spark worries that the comedian is downplaying the consequences of bigotry at a moment when Jewish citizens are being harassed and attacked.
It’s still necessary given the tenor of the times.
It speaks volumes that many of our comedy institutions would rather let sites like The Babylon Bee do the heavy lifting.
Toto offered no evidence that the Babylon Bee is funny to anyone outside of his right-wing bubble.
Curtis Houck used a Dec. 21 post to whine that late-night hosts weighed in on the Colorado Supreme Court ruling removing Donald Trump from the primary ballot in that state:
On Wednesday night and overnight into Thursday, the three liberal network comedians working this week — CBS’s Late Show host Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon of NBC’s Tonight Show, and Seth Meyers of NBC’s Late Night — were bursting at the seams in excitement (as were their audiences) at Tuesday’s decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to throw Donald Trump off the 2024 GOP primary ballot over his actions on January 6.
“You can feel it in the air, folks. There are just five days until Christmas. But Santa came early last night when the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump is disqualified from holding office,” Colbert began as his audience burst into massive cheers and applause.
After thanking Colorado, he joked this “show[ed] you can make good decisions when you’re high” and they certainly had “munchies for justice.”
“Can you imagine how mad Donald Trump must have been when he heard the news. Oh — oh to be a ketchup stain on his wall. Mmm mmm mmm,” he added.
[…]Going finally to Meyers, he did his usual shtick of sounding more like an MSNBC pundit instead of someone paid to crack jokes.
He predictably deployed the Trump supporters-Confederates comparison:
[…]Quoting a liberal historian arguing former Confederates were “completely unrepentant” in sending their own to Congress, Meyers quipped those “who seceded and fought a deadly war that tore the country apart tried to act like nothing happened…pulled a George Costanza trying to show up to work after he quit.”
Meyers hit his stride as he sarcastically wondered if there’s anyone who’s done that since before stating that the 14th Amendment was tailor-made for Trump and “I don’t think anyone can reasonably dispute” Colorado has a slam dunk case[.]
Christy returned to serve up a Dec. 27 year-end piece on the alleged “Late Night ‘Comedy’ Bottom Ten Moments of 2023”:
It was a year of change for late night comedy. The Late Late show was cancelled by CBS after 5,300 episodes since 1995 after James Corden decided to return to England, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show used a series of temp hosts after Trevor Noah walked away at the end of 2022, CBS host of The Late Show Stephen Colbert finally stopped giving Donald Trump the He Who Must Not Be Named treatment, and then, of course, there was the strike that forced them off the air for five months. One thing that did not change, however, was the heavy amounts of leftism, so in the spirit of David Letterman, here are the bottom ten moments from late night 2023.
Conspicuously absent in all of those posts was any mention of Gutfeld — even to argue that he’s making fun of the MRC’s favorite liberal targets. He was also absent from a Jan. 5 joke-counting study by Christy:
Throughout all of 2023, the late night comedians told a total of 9,518 political jokes, and of these 7,729 or 81 percent were directed at someone or something on the right side of the political spectrum, an MRC study has found.
From January 3 through December 22, MRC analysts analyzed all six of the daily late night shows: Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The Late Late Show with James Corden until its April cancellation.
A complete breakdown of all 9,518 jokes can be found here, but detailed below is a summary of all six shows both collectively and individually, but first here is a montage put together by NewsBusters media editor Bill D’Agostino that summarizes the type of jokes told in 2023 inspired by the worst late night moments of the year.
Christy did not explain why Gutfeld was excluded from his study, even though he too tells political jokes and a joke count on him would serve as a useful comparison. Unsurprisingly, Christy appeared on his boss Tim Graham’s Jan. 5 podcast to promote the study.