Part of what made Jon Stewart so successful at the height of the Bush era was his willingness to methodically explain the latest idiocies and fiascoes, even at the expense of humor. Seth Meyers has been aggressively positioning himself to take Stewart’s role for the Trump administration, and in the clip above, the risks of this approach become apparent. The problem with setting yourself a goal that, in normal times, would be pretty achievable— “explain what the president has been up to over the weekend,” for example—involves so much bullshit these days that a 10-minute segment can barely begin to untangle it. Meyers has to stitch together so many clips of news coverage just to get the basic facts on screen that there’s not much time for jokes.
That’s a shame, because the few jokes he gets around to are great: telling Trump “You always look like you just drank a bottle of Nyquil in the shower,” as Meyers does here, is basically every American’s dream. And if Meyers leans a little heavily on the news footage, at least he includes instant classics like MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski gamely trying to read this Tweet aloud in a way that makes it mean something:
It’s hard to accurately chronicle a national collapse and keep things funny—and between the two, “accurate” is probably the most important, even on a late-night show. But here’s hoping Trump’s next fiasco is simple and easy to understand. That way, at least we’d get more jokes out of it.
