There’s a new late-night comedy show, and the Media Research Center’s comedy cop, Alex Christy, has snapped into action to fail to find humor in the show. He kicked things off in a Feb. 2 post (needless bolding in original):
In the spirit of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, CBS’s After Midnight is a reboot of Comedy Central’s quasi-game show @Midnight that the network chose to replace The Late Late Show with James Corden. The show, executive produced by Stephen Colbert, selected young Netflix fixture Taylor Tomlinson to be the host and after ten episodes, it is time to see how the show’s politics match up with its traditional talk-show counterparts.
There is one bit of good news for those wanting their late night comedy to feature less liberalism. Through ten episodes, After Midnight has featured 38 political jokes, which comes out to 3.8 per episode which is considerably less than the other five daily late night shows.
However, of those 26 have been directed towards conservatives, six toward liberals, and six towards those that could be deemed non-partisan. That comes out to 68 percent. If those trends hold, it would make After Midnight two percentage points more liberal than 2023 Jimmy Fallon, but much more liberal than 2023 James Corden. It would also be less liberal than 2023 Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, and The Daily Show.
Tomlinson may be a liberal, but so far she has avoided wearing her liberalism on her sleeve. The most overtly political Tomlinson has gotten was mocking certain Trump supporters trying to take down Taylor Swift which then inspired a game where guests tried to come up with political song titles, some of which were more partisan than others, but none of which targeted the left.
Another segment focused on when Ron DeSantis withdrew from the GOP primary, but that was focused on his Winston Churchill misquotation.
Christy didn’t explain why either of those eminently mock-worthy things should not have been mocked; Christy has previously complained that DeSantis’ Churchill misquote was mocked elsewhere.
Christy then made a point of noting that Tomlinson began her comedy career on the church, where “one could say she actually got fired.” He then complained:
She accuses the church of being too weak on mental health issues—Tomlinson lost her mother to cancer when she was eight years old despite her prayers and her father quickly remarried—and too judgmental. To wit, she also spends a lot of time attacking Christian sexual ethics and “purity culture” and the most mean-spirited joke thus far is probably Tomlinson struggling to control herself when Sophie Buddle narrated a video about a day in the life of a billionaire’s wife, but the “joke” was that it was really about masturbation and Biblical understandings of sexual morality:
Christy concluded by threatening to continue to watch the show:
To date, After Midnight has been a mixed bag, a result helped by the show’s nature as an improv game show that gets its material from what happens on the internet instead of the news. Whether that changes as the show and Tomlinson become more established and we see more of the news and political side of the internet in segments like the Trump-Swift one is to be seen. What hurts the show is Tomlinson’s tendency to bring on comedians who share her worldview, so when politics or religion do come up, it is more liberal. Whatever path After Midnight chooses to go down, NewsBusters will be here to document it either way.
Christy returned for a May 17 post complained about the show having too many Jesus jokes:
CBS’s late night comedy game show After Midnight went off rails on Thursday as host Taylor Tomlinson and her fellow comedian guests yucked it up with some cheap and flippant anti-Jesus and “Jesus was gay” laughs.
Tomlinson set up the round by introducing a TikTok video, “Life is full of surprises. As M. Night Shamalayan once said, ‘Never let them know your next move.’ This is exemplified in this TikTok from @julianprospers where he asks a stranger about his relationship status.”
[…]Tomlinson replied, “I don’t want to be cynical, but I was once in a relationship with Jesus Christ, and it didn’t work out long-term. It’s not Him, it’s me. Let’s save this TikTok guy some heartache. As Jesus, break up with this guy.”
Despite the video’s apparent failure as both viral drama and evangelization tool, Christy defended the videomaker, Julian Prospers:
While it got lost in Tomlinson’s many guffaws, Prospers appears to be someone who believes in using social media to spread his faith. As evident by his video description, the video was a skit about people refusing to commit to Christ, not a genuine man on the street interview with a stranger as Tomlinson portrayed. People can judge for themselves if it hit the comedic sweet spot or not, but After Midnight definitely didn’t.
Christy then decided to run a fact-check on a joke on the show in a May 21 post (even though his employer loves to complain about the Babylon Bee getting fact-checked):
CBS’s After Midnight is sold as a different kind of late night comedy show. Host Taylor Tomlinson typically guides her guests in various internet content-inspired improv question and answer games, but on Monday she began like a typical late night host and gave a monologue in defense of President Joe Biden’s stance on abortion while attacking Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s recent commencement address to Benedictine College.
Tomlinson began by misrepresenting the most talked-about portion of Butker’s remarks, “The biggest story over the weekend was the social media uproar over the commencement speech given by Kansas City Chiefs kicker, Harrison Butker.”
After some booing from the audience, she continued, “Hey, this is an important story to know if you want to fight with your dad this week. In it, he said that women should focus on being wives and mothers instead of having careers.”
Butker never said women shouldn’t have careers, as Tomlinson’s clip showed, “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children he will bring to this world. I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabel, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.
Tomlinson reacted, “Wow, I can’t believe a guy who kicks for a living had a bad take. First off, he said ‘vocation’ so many times there’s no way he didn’t just learn that word. He praises his wife, who he met in band class in middle school. This speech upset me because as a girl who played clarinet for six years, that could have been me. Once I get a football player to bang me, I will ditch this TV show so fast. I’m serious. I’m only killing time until ‘My life truly begins.’”
If Tomlinson wants to criticize Butker for glossing over the fact his wife can more easily afford to be a stay-at-home mom than the average mother because he makes millions of dollars being a professional football player, that would be one thing, but it is not an excuse to misrepresent what he told the graduates.
She also lamented, “A lot of people are focusing on the homemaker part and not the pro-life and homophobia parts.”
Butker was shown speaking about Biden and Pride Month, “He has been so vocal in his support for the murder of innocent babies that I’m sure it appears that you can be Catholic and pro-choice [jump cut] Not the deadly sin sort-of pride that has an entire month dedicated to it.”
Again, Tomlinson reacted as if Butker was just some cranky old man, “Yeah. So we can’t be gay, we can’t have jobs, we can’t have abortions. Who is this guy, my uncle at Thanksgiving?”
Christy concluded by whining that the show is evolving into slightly more political territory:
Tomlinson has always had a bit of a Freudian sense of humor, but thus far, she hasn’t really merged that with politics or religion in the way some others have. That has started to change over the last couple of episodes and now with the added monologue, she risks becoming just like the other late night hosts. Additionally, After Midnight is produced by another supposedly devout Catholic: Stephen Colbert.
Christy didn’t explain why it is forbidden for comedians to mock conservatives, even when they have it coming to them.