Late-Night Hosts Get Explicit About the Orlando Massacre
The late-night shows entered a new phase on Monday night: the post-modern post-massacre mode. Until now, it’s been standard procedure that when a horrific mass shooting occurs, the hosts come out, acknowledge the event and say that it’s difficult to make jokes at a time like this, but the show must go on. That wasn’t the case on Monday night.
On Conan, Conan O’Brien said that he was breaking with the usual hosts-must-remain-neutral-lest-they-alienate-half-the-audience philosophy to come out forcefully for stronger gun control laws. His language was stark: “I am not a pundit, I am not an expert, and always made it a policy to stick to my job, and keep my opinions to myself. I have really tried very hard over the years not to bore you with what I think. However, I am the father of two, and I like to believe I have a shred of common sense. I simply do not understand why anybody in this country is allowed to purchase and own a semiautomatic assault rifle. These are weapons of war and they have no place in civilian life.”
On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert said that by now, we know what politicians will say about these catastrophes, what the president — no matter who he is — will say, and “even me, with a silly show like this, you know pretty much what I will say.” Colbert’s crucial point: “It’s as if there’s a national script that we have learned,” and in so doing, “we tacitly accept that the script will end the same way every time, with nothing changing.” He called for “action,” for things “to change.” He then debated guest Bill O’Reilly about, among other topics, gun control.
On Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Bee described the polite dance hosts do around the issue, but then asserted that her frustration had burst the constraints of this. “F*** it; I am too angry for that,” she snapped. “Hey, is it okay if, instead of making jokes, I just scream for seven minutes, until we go to commercial? No? Okay, let’s go.” She then delivered a righteous screed that culminated in responding to politicians who ask for our “thoughts and prayers” by quoting Biblical scripture: “Thus also by faith itself, if it does not have works, it is dead.”
It seems as though we’ve entered a new phase of talk-show etiquette, in which hosts are no longer immune to feeling some responsibility to express more than just polite sympathy. (Most of them, that is: Jimmy Fallon’s remarks, more brief than any of the others, were the typical, respect-everyone’s-opinion neutrality type comments.) Some hosts are acknowledging what they knew behind the scenes all along: that hosting a nightly talk show isn’t objective journalism — it’s about the subjective relationship formed with a mass audience. And that such a role might include being more involved in taking a stand about current events, rather than just making jokes about them.
