The Media Research Center’s designated comedy cop, Alex Christy, spent the election season raging at late-night TV hosts (but never Greg Gutfeld) for making jokes about Donald Trump. That campaign culminated in an Oct. 30 post (overenthusiastic bolding in original):
During the fall presidential campaign, a Media Research Center study found that hosts of the late-night “comedy” shows told a total of 1,463 jokes about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris — but 1,428 of them were about Trump, and only 35 were about Harris. That’s a whopping 40:1 ratio or almost 98 percent to 2 percent.
From September 3 through October 25, MRC analysts assessed 136 episodes of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers.
For comparison, in 2023, the ratio of Trump to Joe Biden jokes was 3:1, or 74 percent. The 98 percent number is similar to the 96 percent figure that the Center for Media and Public Affairs out of George Mason University reached for the 2020 campaign, although CMPA’s numbers did not include Seth Meyers.
In addition to the 1,428-35 Trump-Harris split, analysts also found that the comedians told 302 jokes about the vice presidential candidates. Of these, 236 were directed at J.D. Vance compared to 66 at Tim Walz. That equates to a 4:1 ratio with 78 percent aimed at Vance.
Combined, that comes out to a 1,664-101 comparison with a 16:1 ratio targeting the GOP ticket 94 percent of the time.
Over the same time span, the comedians also welcomed 44 liberal celebrity, journalist, and political guests compared to zero conservatives. Those included one Colbert interview with Harris, two — one Kimmel and one Daily Show — with Walz, and one Kimmel with Doug Emhoff.
Again, Christy excluded Gutfeld from his his evaluation — presumably because he knows Gutfeld is a reliable right-winger whose partisan “humor” would skew the results away from his wildly biased numbers. He also put “comedy” and “jokes” in scare quotes when referring to the hosts, as if it’s forbidden to make jokes about Republicans.
Tim Graham had Christy on his Nov. 1 podcast to talk about this study, but it’s unclear from the writeup whether they discussed the deliberate omission of Gutfeld.
Christy whined in a Nov. 5 post that Seth Meyers pointed out the hollowness of Republican attacks on Harris while offering reasons not to support Trump:
NBC’s Seth Meyers wrapped up his final pre-election episode of Late Night by claiming Republicans’ only argument against Kamala Harris is that she has a “laugh they don’t like.” By contrast, Meyers then launched into a three-and-a-half-minute long list of reasons to not vote for Donald Trump. The list included some jokey bits like Trump “couldn’t figure out how to close an umbrella,” but also some grave distortions of Trump’s record on the economy.
At the end of his “Closer Look” segment, Meyers concluded, “So, that’s the choice Republicans want to present to you. That’s their closing message: are going to vote for a woman whose laugh they don’t like, or are you going to vote for a guy who fomented a violent coup attempt after a months’ long campaign to overturn the 2020 election, undercut the nation’s response to a deadly pandemic that spiraled out of control because he tried to cover it up, lied about its severity.”
[…]Meyers also recalled how Trump “curtailed access to birth control, picked a running mate who mocked childless cat ladies, creeped out everyone when he tried to order donuts, was accused of having sex with a couch, which he did not do, even though he might have, but he didn’t, but maybe he did, but he definitely did not.”
First, by “curtailed access to birth control,” Meyers means that Trump did the very unfascist thing of expanding religious and moral exemptions for birth control mandates. Second, the Vance-couch bit just proves that, for the left, some bits of disinformation are better than others.
[…]If the election goes against Meyers and Harris, it won’t be because of her laugh. Rather, it will be that nobody believed her sudden conversion to centrism was genuine or they associate her with Joe Biden’s economic, border security, and foreign policy record and view Trump’s as superior.
After the election, Christy mocked the late-night hosts for not taking the results well:
- ‘F*** All’: Daily Show Struggles To Cope With Trump Winning
- ‘What The Actual F***, America?’ Comedy Shows Struggle With Trump Victory
- Meyers Mourns Our ‘Stupid System’ Ended Trump’s Legal Troubles
We recall that Christy’s employer took the 2020 election results so poorly that it promoted false right-wing conspiracy theories about election fraud, even hiring Trump’s own election pollster to concoct them. He then devoted a Nov. 12 post to complaining about the reaction of “Saturday Night Live” to the election:
There’s a well-understood comedy axiom that says if you have to explain why something is funny, then it isn’t, but NBC’s Saturday Night Live fails to understand this because, in response to Donald Trump’s victory, the cast came together for a cringe-inducing performance where they pretended to support him in an attempt to stay off an enemies list.
[…]SNL can’t be too concerned about an authoritarian enemies list if they went on TV and joked about it, even if they ruined the joke by constantly explaining it.
Or, you know, it might just be about daring Trump to arrest people for making fun of him. For a self-proclaimed comedy cop, Christy knows surprisingly little about how comedy works.