During Monday's edition of CBS's Late Show program, host Stephen Colbert chimed in on actress Meryl Streep's six-minute speech slamming President-elect Donald Trump at the Golden Globe Awards the night before, and he gleefully let his liberal perspective come shining through.
As part of his opening monologue, Colbert criticized the Republican official for tweetomg that Streep is “overrated” and called for a "Million Meryl March," a reference to the Women's March on Washington for the day after Trump's inauguration.
"I'll be the one holding the Blu-ray of Kramer vs. Kramer and weeping," Colbert joked.
Referring to the Sunday event, he enthusiastically asserted: “The real star of the night -- and every night in my opinion -- was Meryl Streep,” he said to audience applause and cheers, “who won a [Cecil B. DeMille] lifetime achievement award and stole the show with her acceptance speech," the comedian said.
During her remarks, Streep stated:
Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if we kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.
An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that, breathtaking, compassionate work.
The actress also asserted regarding Trump's behavior: “When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose."
"Yes, we all lose, except Donald Trump, who won," Colbert grumbled. "Of course, the president-elect was all too focused on defeating ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and creating jobs to pick a fight with a celebrity. ... Just kidding."
On Monday, Trump tweeted his view of the situation, calling Streep "one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood” who “doesn't know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes.”
He also referred to the actress as a “Hillary (Clinton) flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never 'mocked' a disabled reporter (would never do that).”
"I'm sorry, what?" Colbert asked in response to the tweets. "What? What did you say? Meryl Streep is overrated? I mean, have you seen Sophie's Choice? The French Lieutenant's Woman? Have you seen the one with dead people? She's even funny in that one."
"Look, Mr. Trump," the liberal comedian continued. "You can refuse to release your taxes, you can call to ban an entire religion, you can play footsie with a dictator, but calling Meryl Streep 'overrated?' No! No!"
He then joked about a remark made by Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway. Colbert asserted she “said we shouldn't get hung up on little things … like what Donald Trump says and does.”
Colbert then played a clip of Conway telling a Cable News Network anchor: “You can't give him the benefit of the doubt on this? He was telling you what was in his heart.”
“You always go by what comes out of his mouth rather than look at what's in his heart,” she added.
Colbert's next comment was ironic: "Stop making fun of what's in [Donald Trump's] heart; that would be cruel because his heart is severely disabled. It is medically incapable of empathy.”
Also during her speech at the awards ceremony, Streep declared: “Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence.”
She then noted:
OK, this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage.
That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in our constitution.
“So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood foreign press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists,” she noted, “’cause we’re going to need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.”
“One more thing,” Streep stated. “Once when I was standing around the set one day, whining about something, we were going to work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me: 'Isn't it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?'”
“Yeah, it is,” she remarked. “And we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should be very proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.”
“As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia (actress Carrie Fisher, who died on December 27), said to me once: 'Take your broken heart, make it into art,'” Streep said in conclusion.
Apparently, Colbert doesn't have a broken heart because he can't make his attempts at humor into art, or comedy, for that matter.
