Remember when late night TV shows would sometimes make jokes that weren’t about our national collapse at the hands of Donald J. Trump? Stephen Colbert remembers! On Friday, The Late Show presented a segment about the current trend of movies with “bad” in the title: Bad Moms, Bad Santa, Bad Grandpa, A Bad Moms Christmas, and so on. Enlisting the help of an all-star cast—Keegan-Michael Key, Ellie Kemper, Jessica Williams, Andy Serkis, Chris O’Dowd, and Bob Odenkirk—Colbert maps out the next three years of surefire blockbuster hits. From popes to haberdashers to giraffes, no career path is safe from this scourge of hard livin’, hard drinkin’… wait a minute. Does the bottle of bourbon Keegan-Michael Key (Bad Cardiologist) and Jessica Williams (Terrible Notary) say “Noblet Creek?” I mean, first off, it’s pretty cool that Knob Creek is getting its distinctive bottle onto Late Night without paying any product placement fees. But more importantly, we’ve seen that prop bottle of bourbon before. Here it is in the summer of 2016:
Wow! Remember what a cartoonish, embarrassing, altogether grueling primary season we had? It was so bad that Stephen Colbert did a whole bit about being glad it was over, joking that he wouldn’t need his bottle of Noblet Creek bourbon. And the bottle is roughly as full as it is in the bad trailers sketch more than a year later. There are two possibilities here, and both of them are disturbing:
- The prop bottle of “Noblet Creek” bourbon is an actual bottle of Knob Creek bourbon with a new label. During the general election, the inauguration, and the first year of the Trump administration, no one at the Late Show felt the need to drink the bourbon.
- The prop bottle of “Noblet Creek” bourbon, while it may at one time have contained Knob Creek bourbon, now contains only tea. During the general election, the inauguration, and the first year of the Trump administration, no one at the Late Show felt the need to drink the bourbon, took a big swallow, spat it out in surprise and disgust, threw the bottle at the wall so hard it shattered, and set off in search of more bourbon.
Any way you do the math, the staff of Late Night with Stephen Colbert seems to be taking this whole Trump administration thing suspiciously well. Are they getting something in the tax bill?
