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.
10. Leslie Jones, The Daily Show, Comedy Central, November 13 on Tim Scott
"'Not now' is what you say when a telemarketer calls you during the dinner time. This was more like ‘We ain't going to ever, ever, ever, ever, ever vote for you [bleep]-ed up ass anti-abortion, anti-gay, Milk Dud-looking mother[bleep]!’”
9. Roy Wood Jr., The Daily Show, Comedy Central, January 23 on Second Amendment Defenders
"So in the U.K., how do you show power? How do you show people that you've got a big dick, but you don’t have a gun?... Okay, so in Norway, how do men let women know that they have a big dick?"
8. Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, ABC, October 19 on Ted Cruz and Donald Trump
"And look, I have a lot of respect for Mitt Romney, but trying to fight Donald Trump by teaming up with Ted Cruz? That's like trying to fight chlamydia by teaming up with AIDS. It's not really a -- what a combination. Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz. You got one guy with the personality of a blowup doll and another who's definitely having sex with them all the time."
7. Roy Wood Jr., The Daily Show, Comedy Central, April 3 on Republicans and Alvin Bragg
"This case is being quarterbacked by a black district attorney and not once have they called him the N-word! That's amazing! Excuse me one more sec-- excuse me one second. Hey there. I am very proud of y'all. You’re very angry about this but at no point have you gone all the way to publicly using the N-word. And that's growth. And I want you to know that I see you and I see your progress and that is just a little pat on the back from your old Uncle Roy."
6. Grace Kuhlenschmidt, The Daily Show, Comedy Central, December 11 and Sean Hayes, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, ABC, December 12 on Christmas and Joseph
"Christmas has never been gay at all. It's always been about a beautiful straight couple, a virgin and her husband who have never had sex and he’s just remarkably chill when she gets pregnant… How have I been so blind? It’s the queerest holiday of all."
"Hey, Fox News alert, pretty much every Christmas character is gay...And then there's Joseph...Why do you think they needed an immaculate conception? Joseph was the only guy in Bethlehem with two beards. The one on his face, and Mary."
5. Sarah Silverman, The Daily Show, Comedy Central, February 15 on Conservatives
"Like, woke for the right is really just an umbrella term so they don't have to say specifically that they're pieces of shit. It feels cooler to say, 'I'm not woke,' than the truth, which is, 'I'm terrified of what I don't understand and I only know how to process that as anger because I can't look inward.'"
4. Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, ABC, February 28 on the Lab Leak Theory.
"In other words, we don't know. But the dingbats now see this as some kind of proof that they were right that the virus came from a Chinese leak in a laboratory, which by the way, it might have. The point is, we didn't know then. We still don't know. But what we did know, that Trump and his buddies blaming the Chinese resulted in a great deal of anti-Asian-American sentiment and even violence in this country and that's why it was irresponsible for the president to call it the 'China Virus.'"
3. Stephen Colbert, The Late Show, CBS, March 1 on Bill Lee
"Lee announced he will be signing Tennessee's sweeping new anti-LGBTQ bills, which, among other things will ban gender-affirming treatment for transgender youth… Governor, remember what Coco Chanel said about accessories, 'Before you leave the house, look in the mirror, and stop trying to score political points with your base at the expense of real human beings, you dick.'"
2. Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, ABC, October 12 on Steve Scalise
"He’s an interesting person, this Steve Scalise, he was one of the biggest gun supporters in Congress, but then in 2017, remember he was shot and seriously wounded at a Congressional baseball game by a man carrying a legally-purchased assault rifle. And when he recovered and came back to Congress, he knew that nothing like what happened to him should ever happen again. So as his first act, he introduced House Resolution 2481, that required all baseball players to carry AK-47s in their protective cups and—it’s an inspiring story, they’ll make a movie about it one day."
1. John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, HBO, November 5 on Samuel Alito
"Incredible. Very well-played. Now, is that going to fix everything? No, of course it isn’t. But when it comes to responding to such wide-spreading devastation, you could do a lot worse than the single best 'Your mom' joke of all time. Especially when you add in that one of that group's [The Satanic Temple] co-founders even said, 'in 1950, Samuel Alito's mother did not have options, and look what happened.'"
