Brow Beat

Seth Meyers Picked a Bad Day to Pre-Tape

Seth Meyers has been doing yeoman’s work sorting through and processing the various rolling disasters that have been befalling the country for the last year. More than other late night hosts, his segments tend toward the omnibus—he’ll start with one subject and move through many more, like he did at “Weekend Update”—making his show a very useful way to catch up with every horrible thing that happened on big news days. Wednesday, as you may have heard, was a big news day. But Meyers must have stolen an accurséd amulet over the weekend or something, because here’s how his segment began:

I apologize—still working through a bit of a cold. I also want to say that this is Wednesday night’s show. You just saw the tree lighting, if you were watching NBC. Here’s the thing about the tree lighting: There are so many people around the building that we could not tape our show on Wednesday. We couldn’t even get into the building. So we taped this Tuesday night, after our Tuesday show. The only reason I would even point that out is so much stuff happens in the world today, that there’s an excellent chance something crazy happened that we won’t comment on, because we taped a day earlier. And I don’t want you tune in and say, “How come he didn’t have a joke about how the president got into a fight with the White House Christmas Tree?” We didn’t know.

As it turned out, more than a few crazy things happened, some of them at Meyers’ home network, NBC! (In fact, NBC spent the day rushing to edit disgraced anchor Matt Lauer out of pre-taped segments for the same Christmas tree lighting ceremony that forced Meyers to pre-tape.) Which is why it’s even more of a shame that Meyers’ segment Wednesday night was great: a deep look at the ways the Republican tax bill reveals the party to be a bunch of malicious jerks with more money than humanity. The highlight is a clip of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin pulling the old “I take that as a compliment” routine when asked why he and his wife were looked so cartoonishly evil:

I never thought I’d be quoted as looking like villains from the James Bond. I guess I should take that as a compliment, that I look like a villain in a great, successful James Bond movie.

“Villains from the James Bond” is great (Mnuchin is 54, not 108), but it’s “successful” that is the tell: Naturally the aesthete who funded Suicide Squad doesn’t care if a movie is any good as long as it makes money. Meyers’ response is classic: “You don’t look like a Bond villain. You look like a Bond villain’s accountant who gets dropped into the piranha tank for trying to sneak out with a bar of gold.” All in all, it’s a very satisfying and well-executed look at Republican contempt for anyone with less money than them. That aired on exactly the wrong day. Sneak back into the pharaoh’s tomb and return the amulet to its sacred altar, Seth Meyers! The curse can still be lifted!