In the Trump Era, the late night comedy shows have been looking for any glimmer of light they can find, and over the course of the first ten months of 2025, they think they have found it in New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. As the industry puts itself squarely in the middle of Mamdani Mania, it has done its part for the campaign by telling 95 percent of its mayoral election jokes about his rivals. Only three out of 63 jokes were about the socialist front-runner.
NewsBusters analysts examined ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, and NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers from January 6 through October 29..
Stephen Colbert led the way with 13 jokes about Eric Adams, 10 about Andrew Cuomo, three about Curtis Sliwa, one about Brad Lander, and one about Mamdani. That is a 27-1 count against Mamdani’s opponents, or 96 percent. Colbert also interviewed Lander and Mamdani on June 23.
Colbert's one Mamdani joke also came on June 23 when he quipped, "Mamdani is a democratic socialist who has promised to freeze rent and make buses free citywide. Sorry, no. Sorry, New Yorkers know there's no such thing as a free ride. People come from all over the world to this city just to pay $3 to sit next to that mystery puddle."
Seth Meyers was next with 14 jokes about Cuomo, four about Adams, and two about Sliwa for a 20-0 count.
The Daily Show’s carousel of hosts combined for an 8-0 tally that included five jokes about Adams and three about Cuomo.
Jimmy Fallon, meanwhile, was the mostly balanced one: had two about Mamdani, two about Adams, and one about Cuomo. That comes out as a 3-2 count, or 60 percent.
Both of Fallon's Mamdani jokes revolved around his age and both were told on June 25. First, Fallon joked, "Mamdani is 33 years old. After he won, he was like, 'My seven roommates are never gonna believe this!" Next, he added, "33 years old. Wow, that's a good age, 'cause he knows the meaning of both the spending cap and no cap."
Finally, there is Jimmy Kimmel, who is the only host in this study to regularly do his show in Los Angeles instead of New York. However, from September 29 to October 3, Kimmel did host five shows from Brooklyn and featured a lot of New York-specific humor, including two jokes about Eric Adams as he dropped out of the race on that first day.
All told, there were 28 jokes told about Cuomo, 26 about Adams, five about Sliwa, three about Mamdani, and one about Lander.
While the comedy shows largely avoided joking about Mamdani, that does not mean they avoided talking about him. Colbert hailed him as a Democrat who is getting people excited, Meyers claimed Mamdani’s primary victory proved the idea that Democrats need to moderate to win was a “load of crap,” while The Daily Show interviewed the co-chair of the Communist Party USA to insist that Mamdani is not the scary communist Republicans are portraying him to be. While NBC’s Saturday Night Live is not a part of this study, they have followed a similar pattern of picking on Mamdani’s opponents and attacking his critics.
Mamdani has also appeared for two interviews during the campaign. One, a June 23 appearance with Colbert, saw Mamdani join with Lander to promote a strategy where, due to New York City’s ranked choice system, their supporters would vote for the other as their second choice. Then, on October 27, Mamdani joined Jon Stewart for a 30-minute puffball interview where Stewart lamented that establishment Democrats have not enthusiastically fallen in line behind Mamdani and compared him to baseball legend Jackie Robinson.
“The greatest city in the world” did not nominate its finest. Of the four main general election candidates, each had something to make fun of. Adams had a corruption scandal involving Turkish Airlines, Cuomo had COVID nursing home and sexual harassment scandals from his time as governor, and Sliwa’s solution to the city’s rat crisis was to create feral cat “colonies.” Sliwa’s Republican candidacy was a long shot that never had a realistic chance, so the limited number of jokes about him is unsurprising. However, there were still more jokes about him than Mamdani, the frontrunner and radical leftist who has trafficked in anti-Semitism and had to be shamed into saying Hamas must disarm.
