During a panel discussion of the state of late-night comedy for the next four years, CNN commentator Scott Jennings took aim at the gang of dour, unfunny regime comics that litter the TV landscape.
Watch as Jennings dissects the sad state of late-night comedy:
CNN NEWSNIGHT WITH ABBY PHILLIP
11/11/24
10:49 PM
SCOTT JENNINGS: The rest of these people have become pathetic. I mean, they stopped being comedians and they started becoming political activists. I mean, Jimmy Kimmel out here crying, it's pathetic. And so, my question is, if you're going to have a late night comedy show, at some point people might expect it to be funny and not just a constant political screed against one party, and you know, I don't know that this activism for four more years is sustainable. If you're going to market something as comedy, the actual product is nothing more than sort of lowbrow political activism.
I’m old enough to remember when Johnny Carson skewered politicians of all political walks of life. But in the feedback loop of politics being downstream from culture, the politics fed back into the culture, somehow sticking America with bitter comics with monologues that mostly lecture, and only joke as a means of attempting to enforce political conformity or impose a narrative.
Jennings was right about many things during this panel (which featured Touré, mostly remembered for falling for a meme about a submerged NYC subway station), including about the one-sidedness of late night “comedy.” As our colleague Alex Christy exposed, the Regime comics had a very hard time processing the election results- hence Kimmel crying on the air, et. al:
JIMMY KIMMEL: Let's be honest, it was a terrible night last night. It was a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants who make this country go, for healthcare, for our climate, for science, for journalism, for justice, for free speech. It was a terrible night for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors who rely on Social Security, for our allies in Ukraine, for NATO, for the truth and democracy and decency and it was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him, and guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him too. You just don't realize it yet.
STEPHEN COLBERT: Who knows what the next four years are gonna be be like? What we do know is that we are going to be governed by a monstrous child surrounded by cowards and grifters and my brain keeps pumping out an unlimited supply of ramifications. It's really hard to see a bright side here.
SETH MYERS: Look, I wish I had some trenchant words of wisdom to impart. I'm sad to say I don't. We're about to step over the precipice into truly uncharted territory. You need only look back to Trump's first term to get a sense of how dangerous his second term will be and no one can say they didn't know what they were getting because Trump made it crystal clear.
So many jokes. One wonders how Myers continues to process all of this, since it was his (along with Barack Obama) tag-team roast of Donald Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner that set the Trump presidency in motion.
Then there is the disproportionate mockery of Republicans, a point Jennings accurately made. One analysis of the presidential campaign showed that a staggering 98% of the Regime comics’ “jokes” were about Donald Trump.
In another study, the Regime comics were shown to have cracked 317 jokes about Trump and George Santos, compared to a mere 47 about Joe Biden and Bob Menendez over the same period of time. This is a feature of late-night “comedy”, not a bug, and the data bear it out.
One hopes that the next four years might Make Comedy Comedy Again. But we’re not holding our breath.
