The big comedy news on the first night of the Republican National Convention wasn’t Donald Trump taking the stage to Queen in his quest to rekindle American exceptionalism — “to the music of a bisexual Englishman,” as Stephen Colbert put it.
It wasn’t Scott Baio, who was in a couple of sitcoms many decades ago, being trotted out as Republican starpower. His appearance at the convention would be “the second time he’s watched helplessly as someone jumped the shark,” said Samantha Bee, referring to a key moment in one of those sitcoms, “Happy Days.” (It’s on Wikipedia, if you don’t know — the show, “jumping the shark,” all of it.)
It wasn’t even Republican nominee Trump, in his “60 Minutes” interview introducing vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence, bragging about how humble he is, a moment that all the late-night shows seized on as an achievement in ultimate Trump-ness.
No, Monday’s comedy blockbuster was Colbert reintroducing “Stephen Colbert,” the fake right-wing pundit he played for nine years on “The Colbert Report.” (It’ll be up to Tuesday night’s shows to handle the authorship question in relation to Melania Trump’s speech, a controversy that was breaking too late for even the live shows to take on.)
Colbert, and Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show,” have made the deepest commitment to coverage of this year’s political conventions, which in their cases means making fun of them thoroughly and quickly.
And Colbert, by a wide margin, won Monday night with the only show that dared to be live and to be almost all RNC; Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show,” by contrast, would mark the first night of the Republican convention by having actor Chris Pine join him in a game of “inflatable flip cup,” because apparently they don’t pay much attention to the news down on fraternity row.
This Colbert — opening with a song-and-dance number lampooning the GOP’s predicament, showcasing a superb taped bit from the floor of the RNC that saw him seize the podium (and get kicked off), and being brave or desperate enough to reawaken the character we thought he had put to bed — is the guy we thought we were getting when he took over CBS’s “Late Show” from David Letterman.
Instead, Colbert in the new role has been too often a sort of smooth-jazz version of his former self, trying to be likable, trying desperately to wring interest out of transactional chats with celebrities, making us miss the old guy, even if he was a faker.
But this week, he is the only one who stepped up to go live every night of the convention. And faced with the challenge and opportunity of being in the moment and topical, the one-time “Second City” improv star was fantastic. More on “The Late Show” in a moment.
Trevor Noah is reaching for something special, too. As he will do with the Democrats in Philadelphia the following week, Noah will be in Cleveland with the Republicans to record his shows starting Tuesday, and, in a late addition to his schedule, he’ll go live on Thursday, the night Trump accepts the nomination and the comics can offer new versions of the apocalypse-is-now jokes they served up Monday night. (As a rule, America’s late-night hosts love the Trump candidacy and fear the idea of it going any further.)
But Noah Monday delivered a tepid, “from the vault” clip show, a collection of past bits showcasing how we got to the verge of Trump being a major party nominee. It had some funny moments — how could THAT campaign not have funny moments, even when we see them for the second time?
But overall there were too many easy, often bawdy lines reacting to various campaign blunders, not enough of the material that has become Noah’s strength: his status as a South African, as a bewildered outside observer of all of this.
Trevor Noah’s best political line of the night: It came at the end of the show, when he told his viewers, “I should have asked if you were ready. I’m from a Third World country. It looks like you are headed for one.”
James Corden on CBS’s “Late Late Show,” Fallon on “Tonight” and Jimmy Kimmel on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” all treated the convention Monday like it was just another monologue topic, instead of a culmination of more than a year of concerted joke-telling.
Corden’s best political line: Speaking of the gold-bedazzled Trump room in which the Trump-Pence “60 Minutes” interview took place, he said, “That room is what a child thinks a rich person’s house should look like.”
Fallon’s best political line: Showing some of the “60 Minutes” appearance, he said, “Turns out that ticking clock wasn’t for ’60 Minutes,’ that was for civilization.”
Kimmel’s best political line: It was a pretty good one, although I have to point out that he led the show not with the RNC but with Pokemon Go. Because millennial viewers. But he pointed out the Monday RNC speaker schedule included Baio, a “Duck Dynasty” star and a former soap-opera actor, saying, “They were one Dennis Rodman short of being a new season of ‘Celebrity Apprentice.'” Bonus points for the implicit Trump reference and for being a better version of Corden’s “those wouldn’t even be great gets for ‘Dancing with the Stars.'”
But while those three hosts treated the convention like a drive-up window, Seth Meyers on NBC’s “Late Night” and Samantha Bee on TBS’s “Full Frontal” made a sit-down meal out of it.
Bee, airing in her usual Monday slot, will supplement her schedule with a special Wednesday night show from Cleveland. That’s the kind of responsible comedy-making we like to see.
And we will like to see it, based on Monday’s effort. Bee’s show has been consistently the most blistering of the topical American comedy shows. You feel as if she and her producers are putting on air the material that kills in other shows’ writers rooms but that the shows then kill in favor of something a little more moderate.
Monday night, for instance, she said Trump picked Pence as a running mate only because his staff wouldn’t let him go with his first choice, the concept of (a vulgarity for female breasts). And then it showed a “Trump (Vulgarity)” poster, and the slogan, “Make America (Vulgarity) Again.”
In a taped interview with a Republican kid at another political event, “Full Frontal’s” reporter called the boy “Jerry Falwell in blond larval form” and said one of the boy’s talking points “will go over great in Slytherin.”
Richard Nixon famously said he liked Barbara Bush because “she knows how to hate.” “Full Frontal,” too, is comfortable with that emotion.
Best Bee political line: Her show was all politics so there was a lot to choose from, but I’ll go with her take on the GOP’s rabidly right-wing platform: “It’s not so much a platform as it is the Republican Party’s suicide note.”
Meyers was strong, too, giving the convention and Republican politics his first two segments, the kind of time you might expect from a former “Saturday Night Live” “Weekend Update” anchor.
Best Meyers political line: After showing the “60 Minutes” interviewer trying to highlight differences between Pence and Trump in their stated positions on enhanced interrogation, Meyers said, “And of course Pence is okay with torture. He sat for this entire interview.”
But, again, it was Colbert’s night. It was a showcase for his talents from fronting the clever opening song (“The party of Lincoln had better start drinkin'”) to reacting on the spot in the taped piece on the convention floor (“Chuck Todd!” he yelled up to a network convention booth, “My weasel” — he was carrying a weasel, as part of his “Hunger Games” character — “wants to make love to your goatee!”)
On the live show, his writers reacted to things that had happened that day and even that night. Best Colbert line, perhaps: He’s going live this week because “I want to be the first one to announce the moment America becomes great again.”
But the real surprise was when what had been rumored as an appearance by Jon Stewart, Colbert’s longtime colleague as Noah’s predecessor on “The Daily Show,” turned into that, yes, and a fun one. But it was also an elaborate reintroduction of “Stephen Colbert.”
To ringing applause, “Colbert” launched into an old favorite segment, “The Word,” a kind of comic mini-essay that aims to be more Jonathan Swift than Henny Youngman. It was on that segment on his very first “Colbert Report” that he coined “truthiness,” a word that meant trusting what you feel to be true rather than what may, objectively, be so.
Monday’s Word was a clear antecedent, “Trumpiness.” “Truthiness has to feel true, but Trumpiness doesn’t even have to do that,” Colbert said. “Truthiness was from the gut, but Trumpiness comes from much further down in the gastrointestinal tract.”
His comic (but also serious) meditation on what Trump’s candidacy means led to one of the segments’ typically sharp conclusions: “If you don’t share their feeling that you don’t recognize your country anymore, trust me: If Trump wins, you will.”
It was quite a start to what’s shaping up to be a good week for both American comedy and for learning new ways to say “apocalypse.”
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Twitter: @StevenKJohnson
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