Hillary Refuses to Laugh at Trump With Jimmy Kimmel
Late-night TV continues to grapple with its most vexing dilemma: How to deal with Donald Trump, the candidate who makes statements that sometimes seem so bizarre or offensive, they invite laughs and ridicule. At the same time, the hosts recognize that night after night, the accumulation of Trump’s ceaseless barrage of quotes, tweets, and attacks might not be something we can — or should — be laughing off.
Jimmy Kimmel faced this with guest Hillary Clinton on Monday night. He’d set up what he probably assumed would be a jolly segment in which Clinton was to reach into a bowl topped with a Trump-like wig, select slips of paper, each of which contained a Trump quote, and try to read it with a straight face. But in reading Trump’s quote on feminism and his insults of Rosie O’Donnell, it proved easy for Clinton to remain poker-faced. When Clinton said, “This is such a serious time in our country,” Kimmel cut her off by yelping, “Not really! Not really!” and asking if she’d “actually prefer to be running against somebody boring like Mitt Romney.”
This is a problem for the late-night shows: the stark gravity of the coming election has to be reduced to the status of “boring” for a host to be able to justify joking about it. Because the jokes that Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers are currently making (I’m leaving out Jimmy Fallon and James Corden, who opt to live in their fantasylands of games and make-believe) carry very little sting — and virtually no humor rooted in an analysis of politics.
Meyers makes an effort, in his “Closer Look” segments. On Monday, he attempted to sum up the state of Trump’s campaign shifts that happened while Late Night was pre-empted by NBC’s coverage of the Olympics.
Meyers’s attempt to place Trump behavior in the context of what he called the “right-wing bubble and white identity-politics” that Trump’s current roster of advisers inhabit was a solid basis for some sharp commentary and satire, but his material wasn’t quite up to the challenge. Even his physical description of new Trump’s campaign manager, the former Breitbart News bomb-thrower Steve Bannon — Meyers said he looks like “Jabba the Hut’s deadbeat son” — was inferior to Colbert’s description the same night: “Breitbart news chief and lesbian haircut model Steve Bannon.”
As for Colbert, he came back from vacation celebrating Trump’s low standing among black voters even as Trump was trying to court the African-American vote, and the candidate’s low poll numbers in general.
This is always dangerous territory for anyone on TV, be they a comedian, news anchor, or commentator. As Clinton said when Kimmel greeted her as “the co-founder of ISIS” — a reference to an actual Trump charge — such statements are “crazy, but it’s harmful” to serious political discourse. The most striking thing Kimmel elicited from Clinton was her admission about preparing for the upcoming presidential debates. You can study and get ready, she allowed, but “you’ve also got to be prepared for, like, wacky stuff that comes at you.”
Remember when the “wacky stuff” came only from talk-show hosts making fun of the candidates, rather than the candidates themselves?
Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Late Show With Stephen Colbert air weeknights at 11:35 on ABC and CBS. Late Night With Seth Meyers airs weeknights at 12:35 a.m. on NBC.
