The Politics

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All Sleep Number smart beds offer temperature solutions for your best sleep. Check it out at a Sleep Number store or sleepnumber.com today. Donald Trump was winning. He was winning. All the counties that mattered, he was winning the Electoral College. I remember thinking, wow, like, it's real now. That moment for me was when The Daily Show with Trevor Noah started. A lot that was new started at that moment.

An avalanche of politically charged humor came tumbling down in late night television because no public figure since the start of late night in the 1950s had ever ignited that combination of comedy inspiration and pure rage that Donald Trump did when he descended an escalator and ascended to the presidency. I'm Bill Carter. And this is Behind the Desk, the story of Late Night. In this edition, we're going to talk about how Late Night got in a lather over Donald Trump and politics.

Always attuned to whatever issues were dominating the news. With a president like this, late-night comedy found a new political gear. Full throttle. and Trump humor pretty much overran the late-night landscape. This morning, Donald Trump asserted executive privilege over the Mueller report. Executive privilege, of course, is actually Trump's favorite privilege.

Right after a white, male, and Mar-a-Lago handicap bathroom. Well, as you might expect, Trump has been tweeting a lot today, and you can tell he's getting worried, because one of his posts said... They are fining Biden votes all over the place in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan so bad for our country. Dude, they're not fining votes. They're counting them.

Briefly over the weekend, people started to notice that his hair is suddenly now white. It's completely white. The carpet now matches the supremacy. Unrelenting and unstinting focus on Trump. brought an unfamiliar tone to late night television. Johnny Carson, who defines so much of the late night genre, had always operated in the PFZ, the partisan free zone. The jokes had bite.

but didn't draw blood. During the Vietnam War, for example, Carson took no overt stand. One competitor, Dick Cavett, did. Never been anything in our history to parallel the Vietnam War. All the analogies to other wars seem to be inadequate. Dick Cavett booked guests who were outspoken in their anti-war views. One of them... was the most significant Vietnam dissenter in the nation, a man willing to go to prison for his principles, the heavyweight champion of the world, Muhammad Ali.

the possibility of going to jail uh white america right now spending 30 million dollars a day in asia black and white boys are dying unjustly for nothing just to free somebody else so why should i worry about going to little old jail to free my poor people who's been catching Of course, Cavett's show needed to court controversy to stand out against Carson's comedy. The Carson model of nipping at a politician's heels...

rather than chewing on their necks, was considered the model for the genre. A typical Carson joke during the height of Watergate. Nixon has a new favorite flavor of ice cream. Impeachment.

It was a much different era for political humor than when Trump was in office and shattering every precedent. Back then, a new obscure politician like Vice President Dan Quayle could wander rather innocently into the late-night crossfire, as Jimmy Brogan, head writer for Jay Leno's monologue, recalled. The news didn't change as much.

As it does now. You have Trump making news every day. In those days, you might have Dan Quayle or somebody. You might have some target. Yes. But now, you have a font of... material flowing. But then it was, you know, okay, Dan Quayle can't spell potato. Yeah. And you'd run that for a week. Oh, we'd have to. But Dan Quayle, who is vice president of the United States and probably not quite suited for the job. And he goes to a school at one point and...

The little kid's up at the blackboard and spells out potato, and Dan Quayle says, no, no, there's an E on the end of potato. And, of course, this was months of jokes about Dan Quayle. Quayle, a typically bland vice president. could never have qualified as anybody's idea of a villain. He was just a convenient target. In fact, in his final monologue, Carson made a point of pleasantly thanking Quail.

for providing him with steady material. Now, I know I've made a lot of jokes at the expense of Dan Quayle, but I really want to thank him tonight for making my final week so fruitful. Late-night writers always try to find the comedy persona of a politician, and then fire BBs in that direction for as long as the poor Assad is occupying the stage. Dan Quayle's persona? A dullard.

Jimmy Carter, a hick peanut farmer. Bill Clinton, a womanizing hound. Jay Leno did 4,607 jokes about Bill Clinton. Yes, somebody counted. Probably all but 10 of them were about Clinton constantly being on the prowl. And way too many during the Monica Lewinsky scandal stepped far over a line now recognized as offensively misogynistic.

Jay wasn't alone. David Letterman told some astonishingly sexist jokes about Lewinsky, like one from a top ten list of lines from a Monica Lewinsky book. Me and my big mouth. Dave later apologized, saying that he had helped push her humiliation. At least Clinton merited the attention. He was the president, after all, and he likely got used to and rolled with most of the late-night shots.

That didn't mean a host couldn't stray into less acceptable areas, as Conan O'Brien found out when he served as the joke teller at a White House correspondence dinner. There has been a long association between the White House Correspondents Dinner and comedians, particularly late-night hosts. Bob Hope was the guy telling jokes way back in 1944. He later appeared in 1976 with Chevy Chase, who had just become the anchor of Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update.

Milton Berle appeared in 1954. Richard Pryor in 1968. That one would have been worth hearing. And Jay Leno made his first appearance in 1987. He came back several times later, the last being in 2011. Jon Stewart turned up in 1997. He killed, by the way. But some late-night hosts were certainly more memorable than others.

One late-night star, Seth Meyers, may have played an outsized role in American political history with his correspondence dinner appearance in 2011. Seth took the opportunity to direct his comedy attention... not just to the president in attendance, Barack Obama, but also to one celebrity guest at a nearby table. The peltering that Donald Trump took that night led to speculation that he vowed revenge.

and ran for president because of it. Though Trump himself later denied that that was the reason, check out the video sometime. He did not look happy. In 1995,

Conan O'Brien was a few years into the job of host of NBC's late-night show. He had settled in well after a brutally rocky start. So why not go make a big splash in D.C.? Robert Smigel, who helped write and perform Conan's appearance that night, recalled how it all went down. I mean, it's 1995. He hasn't even been on the air for two years. So, you know, he's safe. He's not going to get canceled anymore.

But he's, you know, he's trying to become respected. This was a big deal. And I think the Clinton bit had become very popular. The Clinton bit in question was a regular Conan feature called Clutch Cargo. It was based on an old cartoon where the drawings were static and only the character's lips moved. Smigel played a number of the characters with his Clinton impression the big fan favorite.

mainly because he sounded less like the real guy than Yosemite Sam of Looney Tunes fame. Please welcome President Bill Clinton. Here he comes. Welcome, Mr. President. So Conan wanted to do the bit for the White House Correspondents' Dinner, but first they wrote a monologue for Conan, which was fantastic, just great jokes, and Conan delivered them.

beautifully and he murdered. This is true, I hear. When you attend a function with the president, the Secret Service puts you through an extensive background check. Yeah.

It's a little embarrassing, actually. It turns out technically I'm still a virgin. But I don't even know what that means. Then they brought... bill clinton out because well we've got to do clinton in front of clinton and for the first i'd say five or six minutes it was destroying and clinton is uh laughing his ass off and he's got this kind of donkey laugh and i don't know if he's over compensating to make sure everybody knows what a good sport he is or if he's really that amused but he's like

That's exactly, I'm not kidding. And what was great about it was that it signaled the audience to laugh, that it was okay to laugh. Conan was rolling, his confidence building. And then two things happened. It went too long. And we also, there was one little segment in there that we worried, is this going too far? The premise was, I'm on C-SPAN, right? That's like a...

you know, a tree falling in the forest. This is great. I can say anything. And he's, and then he starts, uh, making different confessions like that I inhaled. And, um, I don't really remember the other jokes, but we were killing it. Then there was this one line where Clinton confesses to getting high on the roof of the Kremlin with Willie Nelson in the 60s. Conan's like, is it too much?

And I was like, I don't want to just be, you know, cute. I don't want to just do a cute thing. I want to do something that makes them a little uncomfortable. So we do it and it doesn't kill. But not only doesn't it kill, but Hillary. who was kind of laughing up to now. And this Willie Nelson line just doesn't agree with her. And according to Dick Cavett, who we saw after the event, he said to Conan, Hillary went from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.

On a dime, her face dropped, and he said it chilled the room. And we had like five more minutes. Conan's transgression of going a bit too far and a bit too long only proved it was still the era of be funny with the politicians, but don't make them too uncomfortable. A few years later,

In 1999, something happened that lit a much hotter fire under the relationship between late-night hosts and the people making policy and news in Washington. Jon Stewart replaced Craig Kilbourne as host of The Daily Show. Alison Silverman had been a writer for Conan before she moved to The Daily Show, just before Stewart arrived. Early on in my tenure there, there were a lot of sillier stories.

I remember stories about the Swiss bicycle troops and stories about an inventor of bird diapers. John was really interested in taking the show in a... that was more editorial of more important current events. Hard to find comedy topics better than bird diapers, but Jon Stewart quickly found some other more substantive targets. David Javerbaum, then a Daily Show writer, remembered the excitement of the 2000 election recount. Well, the whole month of the Bush-Gore recount...

We had a month of that, and those were great shows. Like, for example, election officials looking at hanging chads. That's inherently funny, and you can write hilarious jokes on that. Some quarters of late night, even Saturday Night Live in those days, believed that diving into the deep end of politics was a risk because younger viewers notoriously didn't pay any attention to current events. Jon Stewart's Daily Show began to turn that view upside down. Alison Silverman again.

I mean, the thing about late-night shows, you know, there'll always be people saying, like, you know, these shows are getting so important, you know, young people are getting news from these shows. And, of course, sort of the official response... to that was always like, this is a comedy show. People should be getting their news from real news sources. And I think we believed that. But at the same time, the thing about delivering news is...

It makes you feel important and it makes you feel like a part of something. The rough days, of course, were feeling like, oh my gosh, I'm now going to tell jokes about some congressman, a state congressman who said something ridiculous. I'm not sure. if I'm part of the problem or the solution with this because maybe this guy doesn't really need another megaphone for his crazy ideas or whatever. But other times it would feel like, hey, maybe we're making a difference. Making a difference.

Since when was that ever part of what comedy is supposed to do? Isn't that what the news is supposed to do? I did an event once with Jon Stewart and the NBC News anchor Brian Williams. And I pressed John on why what he was doing didn't qualify as journalism. He could not have been more adamant. I'm a comic, not a journalist, he said.

And indeed, the show under Stewart, even when addressing serious topics in the news, always went for the joke. Pew Research pointed to such a moment when covering a serious Senate hearing. The then-Senator... Barack Obama confronted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Iraq policy. Here's Jen Flans, who produced The Daily Show under John and Trevor Noah. It's funny because John was always...

Yeah, he was like, we are a comedy show. We're not a news show. And really it is. And it still is comedy first. But even under John, like we we have fact checkers like we would never put something out. I mean. at least on purpose, that was fake news or false information. It's all grounded in reality and fact. I think that I used to be more on the side of like, no, we're just a comedy show. Don't listen to us over here. We're just making jokes.

And now I would say because the news has changed so much and the news became opinion. So it's a really different landscape now. I still think we're a comedy show first, but I don't mind as much when people. say, oh, I got my news from The Daily Show. When they used to say it, I'd say, oh, you're missing half the jokes because if you're not watching the 24-hour news networks, you're not even getting who we're parodying and all this stuff. And now I'm just glad people are getting news.

By the way, The Daily Show does call its regular lineup of comics correspondents. One current member of that team, Roy Wood Jr., actually comes from a family of journalists. You know, I grew up in a journalism home. My father was a journalist. I have two brothers that were in the craft. And for me, coming out with a degree in broadcast, I enjoyed the news, but I never wanted it in a traditional, structured way.

way, like I liked the weirdness of it. I like for something to be just a little bit off center. And so that was something that I always like, all right, that. That part of the journalism I think I could try and do, and The Daily Show did that on a nightly basis. We'll talk about the impact Jon Stewart had, not just with his comedy take on the news. but also with his personal passion to try to set things right when we return to Behind the Desk after a short message.

Why choose a Sleep Number smart bed? Can I make my sight softer? Can I make my sight firmer? Can we sleep cooler? Sleep Number does that. Cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side. Your Sleep Number setting. It's the final days of Sleep Number's biggest sale of the year. All beds on sale. Up to 50% off the limited edition smart bed. Ends Monday. All Sleep Number smart beds offer temperature solutions for your best sleep.

Check it out at a Sleep Number store or sleepnumber.com today. Why choose a Sleep Number smart bed? Can I make my sight softer? Can I make my sight firmer? Can we sleep cooler? Sleep Number does that, cools up to eight times faster, and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side. Your Sleep Number setting. It's the final days of Sleep Number's biggest sale of the year. All beds on sale. Up to 50% off the limited edition smart bed. Ends Monday.

All Sleep Number smart beds offer temperature solutions for your best sleep. Check it out at a Sleep Number store or sleepnumber.com today. As the new century started...

What viewers began to notice on The Daily Show was deep research, unearthing clips no one else was finding. In other words, new, true information. As in, news. and the guy delivering it was not holding back on driving home the points he wanted to make. Senator John McCain's support for the war in Iraq was a particular sore spot for Jon Stewart.

His advocacy of the Iraq war was legend. His sophisticated knowledge of the region unparalleled. In that it did not parallel with anybody who had knowledge of the region. There is not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias. So I think they can probably get along. No, that is a true statement. If you...

Don't count the long history of violent clashes between Sunni and Shia. That clip underscores the completely new take Jon Stewart brought to politics in Late Night. If he didn't like something that was happening in media or politics... He was mad as hell, and he was not going to take it anymore. In other words, he had a point of view. And very quickly, Jon Stewart was not alone in bringing point of view to late night shows, mainly because his daily show...

spawned a new generation of hosts with something to say about politics. John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Hasan Minhaj, and of course... Nobody raised point-of-view comedy to a high art nearly as well as Stephen Colbert. Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report. That was my favorite show. I studied that show. Sarah Cooper.

whose lip-synced impressions of Donald Trump exploded last year on TikTok, was inspired by Colbert's inverted image point of view, which he performed on The Rapport. That was the first time I realized that you could make fun of something. by becoming that thing. And so he became the thing that he was making fun of. And I just loved the way that he did satire. And now I watch Fox News, which is like the Colbert Report.

on steroids because you have all of these like really intelligent people like defending this complete madman. And that's kind of what the Colbert Report was doing was this fake. conservative right-wing talk show host being very genuine and earnest about defending the most hideous, horrendous things. It was just like perfect. I just loved, I loved that show.

Colbert essentially turned his show into a nine-year-long impression. It seemed unimaginable that anyone could pull something like that off. It was such a high-wire act, it demanded fearlessness. And never more so.

then shortly into the show's run, when Colbert was invited to be the entertainment at, yes, another White House Correspondents Dinner. This was in 2006. The High Wire. got awfully wobbly that night, with Colbert unleashing a litany of jokes about the Bush administration's incompetence in Iraq. I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq. No previous late night host had been quite so bold.

and standing up there alone on the dais, a few feet away from the man he was eviscerating. One particular line landed with a thud in that room, very close to where George W. Bush was sitting. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias. Did it get tense?

Allison Silverman was there. You know, I was at Stephen's table and I'd gotten a chance to meet a lot of folks and a lot of press people were coming over to Stephen's table and saying hi to his family. And then... Steven went on stage and things got extremely, extremely uncomfortable very quickly. It was hard to tell what had happened. I mean, I didn't come away with it.

thinking, oh, this is going to be a triumph. It didn't feel like the world was going to be on board with this. It felt like we may be really bombed. I think that this was part of it was the feeling that like, okay, we are doing what we do on the show all the time. And, you know, we assumed that Steven was invited because of what he was doing on the show.

We're kind of presenting the same thing. You know, there are some people who I feel like really enjoy being provocative and maybe making people angry even. Stephen is not that person. Like, we all... I feel like everyone in that writing staff wants everyone to love them. So it was, yeah, it was, it was rough. Rough indeed. Even now.

Descriptions of the evening say that Colbert was met with silence and muttering. A big room is often described as unforgiving for struggling comics. This was beyond that. The room was out for revenge. Colbert got battered by those in attendance, both from the administration and by members of the media who thought taking on Bush that way was rude.

Colbert was left shaken and depressed, but none of that lasted. Repeat airings of his performance on C-SPAN were met with wild enthusiasm. The routine was labeled brilliant political satire. and the gutsiest performance many had ever seen, even a defining moment for the Bush presidency. Ratings for the Rapport soared. Colbert was a hit. For Alison Silverman,

the show began to grab a place in the culture of the moment. I know one time that I feel like it was important to me and it stands out for me, and that was when the show went to Iraq. We were doing a piece called Formidable Opponent, and we decided to do Don't Ask, Don't Tell. And... Our audience was troops, and we weren't really entirely sure how troops would react to a comedy piece about the pros and cons of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. But anyway, the...

The troops really went for it, and it got a lot of laps. People like Lieutenant Colonel Victor Fehrenbach are being discharged after serving 18 years in the Air Force, even though he has nine air medals, including one for valor. Yeah. but he got those medals before he was gay. We have no idea how he would fly now. I felt like, to me at least, it was very clear that the troops felt that...

it was possible to have openly gay people in the military. So they were very on board with it. And I don't know if that made any difference to anybody, but it felt like a big deal to me. Remarkably, to this point in late-night history, A sitting president had never been on a late-night show. They had appeared as candidates. John Kennedy was a guest with Jack Parr when he was running in 1960.

And of course, most memorably, Bill Clinton opened Arsenio Hall's show wearing a cool pair of shades and playing Heartbreak Hotel on sax in June of 1992. But presidents had not visited late night while in office. Barack Obama changed that. Perhaps because he was so confident in his own performing ability. At one point, he slow jammed the news with Jimmy Fallon.

Or maybe he just saw late night as a way to reach constituents more informally. But Obama started making the rounds, beginning with Jay Leno's top-rated Tonight Show in 2009. I'm excited. I'm honored to introduce my first guest, the 44th president of the United States. Please welcome President Barack Obama.

Let me just say I think Kevin looks good in a suit. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Donald Trump, of course, never subjected himself to the glare of late night once he set foot in the White House, though he was often asked.

The jokes ruined the mood for him. The relationship between late-night host and president wasn't based in banter anymore. It was based in pugilism. And a distinctive point of view became essential. Trevor Noah was certainly distinctive. His wasn't even an American point of view. I remember when he started, we were like, we should be careful not to keep pointing out that he's not from here.

People are going to get scared. How can he possibly, you know, comment on the news? That is The Daily Show executive producer, Jen Flans, again. The truth was, the more we leaned into it, the more we figured out that he could see things that we just could not see because he was coming at it from such a different, he's just an outsider point of view. And he's the one that walked in and saw one of the debates and was like...

who's that guy about Trump? And he's like, oh, that guy's going to win. And we were like, nah, it's just a rating stunt for The Apprentice. He's not going to win. What are you talking about? He was like, no, that guy, I've seen that guy before. He's very charismatic.

He said, no, he's like, I've seen this. There's like a million African dictators. I've seen this chest puffed up. This is the guy that's going to win. And we were like, what? Who are you? We thought we were in real trouble. As it turned out. Noah, despite his initial reaction, saw what the polls were saying and didn't really expect Trump to win until election night. I remember thinking, wow.

It's real now. We've got to step it up. Because before then, I felt like everything was, what's it going to be under Hillary? I don't know. What's it going to be like in the future? I don't know. If politics was previously a feature of late night comedy, with Trump as the main player, It became an ongoing serial. To try to stand outside that meant suddenly losing your equilibrium. That's what Jimmy Fallon found out when he tried to deal with Trump lightheartedly.

in keeping with his appealing variety-style talents. During the campaign, Trump came on as a guest, and Jimmy, now infamously, tousled Trump's gravitationally improbable head of hair. For some viewers, this was an unforgivable lapse of comedic judgment. Jimmy was humanizing the enemy. Once dominant in the ratings, Fallon started a slide.

one that became harder and harder to pull out of as Trump continued to upend every news cycle with some outrageous comment or act, setting up ever more outrageous comic reactions all across late night. For Hasan Minhaj, a Muslim host, confronting a president pushing a travel ban on Muslims, this got personal. My mom was in India at the time, and she called me to ask me, hey, am I going to be able to get back into the country?

Hassan's one-time Daily Show colleague, Samantha Bee, got her own show on TBS, unleashing a fearless female voice in Trump comedy. As we all know, restricting abortion which is a safe and legal medical procedure is one of Trump's favorite hobbies. But Trump doesn't believe any of that shit. If Trump hasn't paid for at least a half dozen abortions, I will eat this blazer. Actually, I take that back. That was wildly unfair. If Trump hasn't promised to pay for at least a half dozen abortions...

We'll talk about the spell that Donald Trump cast over late-night comedy and, now that the spell is broken, what life is going to be like in late-night, after Trump, when we return to Behind the Desk. After another short message. You try to be in control of how your info is protected, but many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it.

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For the past five years, Donald Trump's omnipresence pushed out virtually every other topic for comic consideration in late-night television. Stephen Colbert at one point... was doing 11-minute monologues of nothing but Trump jokes. The Daily Show correspondent, Roy Wood Jr., said he was increasingly challenged to keep it fresh. It was also very hard to take serious.

which in hindsight, probably a mistake. But the difficult balance that we have to maintain with The Daily Show is finding a new angle on the things that people are already talking about. But then also covering the things that you should know something about. You know, we can't just swim in the Trump waters for 30 minutes and follow Trump around. And Trump did this, wasn't that crazy? At that point, we become groupies.

of a particular political figure. And I think that's a very dangerous place for any media outlet to be, be it satirical or not. The thing that's interesting also is that as the country suffers and as things change and as more people are in pain... I can go back and watch episodes of The Daily Show that we did during the campaign and jokes that we made about Trump then that wouldn't get greenlit now because it's not funny, because there is real hurt and there's real tragedy.

attached to this man's administration. So I just hope that what happened with Trump pre-election and post-election in 2016 will change how we as the media start looking at candidates. Amber Ruffin confronted the Trump elephant in the room as both a writer for Seth Meyers and a host herself. She acknowledged that Trump fatigue could leave a comic exhausted. It could, as she sang with her sidekick, Tarek Davis, even make a late-night host catatonic. Catatonic.

I'm catatonic. It was just like, I am ingesting news at a rate that is unhealthy, and it has stopped me from being able to move. or contribute to society. It was just Tarek laying on the ground, prone, me laying on my desk and just us rapping to the camera about how catatonic we were. And I can't believe we did it. We did it. Been nervous about the election since early last year. I knew that things would get bad, but yo, I had no idea. Always watching the news.

Always getting up on it, and now it comes at a price, because now I'm catatonic. I'm catatonic. The drumbeat of Trump comedy often gave late-night hosts some pause. knowing that all the outrageous moments and comments demanded comic skewering, but at the same time, feeling the genuinely consequential and often frightening real-life impact Trump was having on real Americans.

Politics, that subject is now a big part of my show. But it's just because it's our job to talk about the things America is talking about. And it's hard to believe that these things are happening in our country. Jimmy Kimmel, of course, was thrust into the middle of Trump's assault on health care coverage when his newborn son faced a health crisis. In speaking out, Jimmy became central to the issue and his emotional eloquence.

likely influenced the outcome. When something bad happens to me, I try to make something good out of it. And it just so happened that a vote was happening with American health care and Obamacare. A lot of people watched it and a lot of people... Republican and Democrat responded to it. But with the Trump presidency over, where does late night go from here? Is the long national monologue on Donald Trump over?

Will Trump be missed in late night? One person sure thinks so. In his final days in office, Trump himself tweeted, in his charming way, that the no-talent late night hosts... would miss him dearly, which, of course, occasioned a few parting shots from center stage. He wrote, the three very weak and untalented late-night hosts...

First of all, I don't know why he would call Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers weak and untalented. Those guys are friends of mine, and I think that's rude. And what do you mean, what are we gonna do when you're not president? Well, first, there's the parade. Then... Then there's the national orgy. Then... I'm thinking maybe a sandwich and a nap. If he's really gone or really mostly gone, what do you do about Donald Trump now? Sarah Cooper really wants to move on from him.

And politics too. You will have to find other things too. bring people together. We all related on how much we hated this guy, and now we have to relate on something else. And I'm excited for that because I don't think politics should be... on the top of everyone's brains the way that it has been this year. Politics is...

It's very divisive. It's very ugly. And there's so many things that connect us that we don't talk about anymore because we're always talking about the things that are dividing us. And so I think the future of comedy is... finding things other than politics to make fun of. And I think those things are going to be kooky and wacky and absurd and smart and unexpected and surprising.

I'm excited for that. Okay, but what is late night going to do with Joe Biden? Old, unoutrageous, empathetic, and often gaff-prone Uncle Joe Biden. Amber Ruffin isn't too worried. Joe Biden is going to be fine for comedy. You know what I mean? Old as hell. Says whatever he feels. I think we're all going to be all set. But, you know, hopefully it'll be boring. I want to forget we have a president. That's what I want.

But, you know, now we're in this new era where we all realize we can't just be like, I like you president. Goodbye. You're going to do a great job. Now we all kind of know a little bit better and we know, oh, we need to keep pressuring these fools. Hopefully. This Biden presidency won't be as terrible as Trump. And it won't be as we won't be as passive as we were when Obama was president. And it will be somewhere in the middle. That would probably be.

the healthiest thing. My own prediction, we're never ever going back to the PFC, the partisan free zone in late night comedy. The reins have been loosed, erased really. And the hosts and their writers are not going back to light-hearted both-sides-isms. For one thing, the audiences have already divided on this. Trump fans are never going to forgive Stephen Colbert.

And besides, late night has clearly found its voice on real issues of substance. And it likes being heard. Roy Wood Jr. If the job of late night television is to encompass... humor and satire about the world around us and the issues of the moment, regardless of if they're political issues or not, just the issues of the moment, sooner or later, you're going to have to comment.

on social justice. Sooner or later you're going to have to comment on race. Sooner or later you're going to have to comment on LGBTQIA issues. Sooner or later you're going to have to comment on women's rights. Because that's where we are as a country. Like, when Jimmy Fallon is starting to do Trump jokes, something has changed. Something has changed.

the story of late night, wherever you get your podcasts. Also, please rate and review us. We'd love to know what you think. Behind the desk, the story of late night. is a production of CNN Audio and CNN Original Series. It's executive produced by me, Bill Carter, as well as Johnny Kalangas, David Brady, and Kate Harrison-Carman. Megan Marcus is the executive producer of CNN Audio. For CNN Original Series, special thanks to Molly Harrington and Kira Bodengologorski. The producers...

are Mark Malkoff and Johnny Kalangas. Our editor is Nick Pruer, and our engineer is Neil MacDonald. Matt McClellan is our line producer. Special thanks to Amy Entellis, Ashley Lusk, Courtney Koop, John Ehler, and of course, to all the great people who shared their experiences and insights with us.

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