America’s garish presidential election has been a late-night host’s dream come true. The jobs are plentiful, and the jokes write themselves — so much so that everything started to look and sound the same.
Even the audiences sound the same, their laughter and applause forming prolonged Beatlemania-like squeals of agreement, a noise usually heard at actual political rallies. It’s not news to anyone that late-night, over the past four elections, became a way to excite the left and encourage the youth vote through sarcasm and satire.
Late-night audiences have been whooping and barking since the Arsenio Hall days, but this is noise is different, louder, approving of the rant, the tirade, the cutting quip. While watching a recent taping of “Late Night With Seth Meyers” in Washington, D.C.’s Warner Theatre, I was struck by how willing the audience was to over-effuse, whether producers gestured for them to do so or not, ensuring that every single punchline in Meyers’ (certainly sharp) “Weekend Update”-style opening monologue sounded as if Hillary Clinton had secured another electoral-college vote. Laughter has been replaced by shrieking assent.
The jokes also meet one another coming around the corner, unable to avoid duplication. Take Trump’s resentment over an Emmy snub, which came up during his last debate with Clinton on Oct. 19. CBS’ “Late Show” host, Stephen Colbert, made a taunting joke that night with two of his own Emmy statuettes (“You know Donald, you really should get one — they’re fantastic”) and then, four nights later on HBO, “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver went for what is essentially the same laugh, offering to hand his own recently won Emmy statuette over to Trump in exchange for the candidate’s acceptance of the election’s results. (“That way if you lose, you still win.”)