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    ‘No reason not to be all in’: is Saturday Night Live ready to meet a major political moment?

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    Paul Simon sang The Boxer. New York mayor Rudy Giuliani appeared with firefighters. When producer Lorne Michaels asked: “Can we be funny?”, Giuliani replied: “Why start now?”It was September 2001 and, just 18 days after the worst terrorist attack in US history, Saturday Night Live’s blend of satire, silliness and live music was back on the air. “In bad times, people turn to the show,” Michaels told Rolling Stone magazine 20 years later.SNL turns 50 this month and must once again try to meet the moment. This time, the crisis is not external but taking place in late-night TV comedy itself. In recent weeks, the genre has become the canary in the coal mine of US democracy.Over the summer, CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, ostensibly for financial reasons, though notably Colbert is a longtime Trump critic and CBS owner Paramount had been seeking government approval of an $8bn merger with Skydance.On 17 September, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show over comments he made after the assassination of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. Hours before the suspension, the Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, warned that local broadcasters who aired Kimmel could face fines or loss of licences and said: “It’s time for them to step up.”The move prompted an outcry over freedom of speech. ABC parent Disney faced pressure from Kimmel’s fans, some of whom cancelled subscriptions to the company’s streaming services Disney+ and Hulu. Kimmel returned to the air six days later and mocked Trump: “He tried his best to cancel me and instead he forced millions of people to watch this show.”Now the spotlight shifts from CBS and ABC to America’s other major network: NBC. When SNL returns on 4 October, Bad Bunny will host with Doja Cat as the musical guest and five new featured players following several cast departures. But no moment will matter more than the “cold open” in how it deals with the current climate.View image in fullscreen“This would be one of the biggest, most important cold openings in the 50-year history of the show,” says Stephen Farnsworth, a co-author of Late Night With Trump: Political Humor and the American Presidency. “But in the past, when Saturday Night Live has faced a major challenge, like they did in the wake of 9/11, they’ve risen to the occasion.”SNL’s mockery of Trump has at times earned the wrath of his supporters and the president himself, but Farnsworth advised against pulling punches, saying: “Saturday Night Live will face charges that it isn’t going far enough or that it went too far pretty much no matter what they do, so there’s no reason not to be all in.”Farnsworth, the director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, adds: “It’s striking that a man who desires the spotlight as much as the president does, who wants to be a public figure as badly as he has over the years, doesn’t understand that criticism is part of the package that comes with power.”Launched a year after the Watergate scandal toppled Richard Nixon, SNL features sketches and live musical performances. But it is also known for covering politics and featuring politicians. The weekend update segment provides ongoing commentary while cast members often parody presidents, candidates and other figures.The most famous include Gerald Ford (Chevy Chase), George HW Bush (Dana Carvey), Bill Clinton (Darrell Hammond), George W Bush (Will Ferrell), Sarah Palin (Tina Fey), Donald Trump (Alec Baldwin) and Joe Biden (various cast and guest actors). Trump is now portrayed with aplomb by James Austin Johnson.Susan Morrison, author of Lorne, a biography of Michaels, recalls: “When Alec Baldwin was doing him, Trump was furiously tweeting right about SNL: it wasn’t funny, FCC should investigate, Lorne was over. Watching Alec Baldwin do his thing, it almost felt like bear baiting. It was so fun to watch the back and forth, and don’t anticipate that they’re going to pull back.”Politicians have also appeared as hosts or in cameos. Al Gore, John McCain, Jesse Jackson and Sarah Palin have all featured. Trump hosted in 2004 and, more controversially, in 2015 during his presidential run. Hillary Clinton appeared multiple times, including alongside her impersonator, Kate McKinnon, and Kamala Harris took part before last year’s election.The show picked up 12 Emmys recently for its 50th season and anniversary programming, including an award for outstanding variety special. Saturday’s episode will be scrutinised closely for how it deals with Trump’s attack on comedy, free expression and democracy – and whether it can make a serious point in a funny, unsanctimonious way.View image in fullscreenMorrison continues: “Lorne and his very smart writers will come up with some clever but on-the-nose way of dealing with this. The thing that it’s important to remember about Lorne is he’s been doing this for so many decades. He’s outlasted so many slates of executives. He’s a survivor. As Conan [O’Brien] told me, in the Game of Thrones of show business, Lorne would be the last man standing.“That isn’t to say that he’s going to cave but he will figure out a way to address this and stay on the air. I also don’t think the people at NBC or Comcast or the FCC are going to mess with him. He’s too much of a statesman in the TV business. But he’s going to come up with a way of dealing with it and addressing it and he’ll be funny about it.”Conservatives have long accused SNL of bias, arguing that the show disproportionately lampoons right-leaning figures while going easier on Democrats. Former head writer Tina Fey openly acknowledged a “liberal bias” in a 2003 interview, fueling the narrative. But Michaels insists that it is nonpartisan and willing to mock both sides.Morrison adds: “It isn’t to say he would ever be an apologist for the Trump regime; nobody could have expected that politics would jump the shark in quite this way. But he certainly would not hesitate to make fun of Democrats even now if they merit it and that’s part of it.“To quote Jim Downey, one of the show’s longtime writers, you never want the show to seem like it’s the comedy division of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. Lorne is committed to that and that will help here as well.”David Litt, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama dubbed “the comic muse for the president” for his work on White House Correspondents’ Association dinner monologues, acknowledges that he has been on the receiving end.“I was in the audience at SNL when their cold open was about the Obamacare website crashing,” he said. “I was working at the White House at the time and I remember thinking, I’m not having fun. Everyone else in the audience seemed be having a better time than I was.”Writing comic material under time pressure is tough, Litt says, and that will be the SNL team’s top priority for the new season. He said: “This is a show that rises to a pretty intense challenge every week and I assume they’re going to be thinking about rising to the exact same challenge, which is, how do we turn around a show that is good and funny because that’s hard enough without having the president of the United States breathing down your neck.“That’s part of what infuriates Trump so much about comedians. It’s not that they’re making fun of him, it’s that the audience is laughing. It’s connecting. If Kimmel or Colbert or weekend update was making a joke about Trump and the audience was rejecting that joke, I don’t think Trump would care. It’s the fact that it exposes him as still, despite everything, a fundamentally laughable person, or at least a human person.”Litt, whose new book, It’s Only Drowning, is about his unlikely friendship with a Joe Rogan fan, adds: “I can’t imagine that people are going to be sitting around a writers’ room saying, how do we address this as though they were journalists. I think they’re saying, how do we do funny stuff? Because doing funny stuff is really hard.”SNL has already used up one potential Trump gag. Its cold open on 9 November last year, the first weekend after Trump won the presidential election, was entitled SNL for Trump and had cast members sarcastically trying to get on Trump’s good side, singing: “We will, whatever you want.” The sketch was a satirical take on the public figures and institutions that had shifted their stances or expressed deference to Trump for political or personal gain.Bill Carter, author of the book The Late Shift and executive producer of the CNN docuseries The Story of Late Night, says: “The gauntlet has been thrown now and, if they don’t do something, they will disappoint people. People will be expecting their take and their take won’t be the most obvious one. It’ll be some creative way of approaching it. They have a very good Trump right now so they ought to use him.”Trump has frequently railed against SNL over the years and is likely to be watching its return with fingers poised for a hot take on the cold open. But like Morrison, Carter thinks it unlikely that SNL will suffer the same fate as Colbert or Kimmel.“Unlike those shows, Trump cannot say this has terrible ratings and does not make money,” he says. “Saturday Night Live does not have terrible ratings. In fact, with the right host, it will often be among the most watched shows on television. And it has the best demographics on any show on television except for sports.“The idea that they would abandon that show is nuts, because if they did, some streaming service would say, we’ll put on Saturday Night Live. It’s 50 years that show’s been on. It’s had an audience all those times of a new generation of viewers. It continues to do that so it’s a tremendously valuable franchise. NBC is not walking away from that show. I don’t care what pressure they put on it.” More

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      Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Only Donald Trump would try to prove he wasn’t threatening ABC by threatening ABC’

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      Late-show hosts discuss Jimmy Kimmel’s record-breaking return to air and Donald Trump’s escalator snafu at the United Nations.Jimmy KimmelAfter breaking his own YouTube monologue record and attracting 6.2 million broadcast viewers on Tuesday night, Kimmel celebrated the fact that his show returned again on Wednesday – at least, “for most of the country”, as Jimmy Kimmel Live! remained off the air for a number of ABC affiliates, including channels in Seattle, Washington DC, Nashville, New Orleans, St Louis and elsewhere.“Thank God they’re not pre-empting the new season of The Golden Bachelor because of this,” he joked, referring to his suspension by ABC owner Disney under pressure from the Trump administration. “The FCC might not like jokes about the president, but they are still very OK with Poppop getting a squeezer in a Jacuzzi, and I think we can be very grateful for that.“A lot of people watched our show last night,” he continued. “I got so many texts from so many people – it made me realize how many of my friends are never watching the show at any other time.”That included “one very special friend” – Trump, Kimmel’s beloved “mad red hatter”, who wrote on Truth Social hours before Kimmel aired: “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his ‘talent’ was never there.”“You can’t believe they gave me my job back?” Kimmel mused. “I can’t believe we gave you your job back.”Trump continued: “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers!”Kimmel fired back: “There’s the threat again, this time straight from FCC-biscuit’s mouth. Only Donald Trump would try to prove he wasn’t threatening ABC by threatening ABC.“You almost have to feel sorry for the people who work for him, who try to clean up the messes,” he added. “They go to all these lengths to say, ‘Oh, it wasn’t coercion! The president was just musing!’ And then the second Trump is alone, he sits on the toilet, he gets his grubby little thumbs on his phone, and he immediately blows their excuses to smithereens, and says it was ratings that got me fired.”Trump ended his Truth Social rant with: “Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad ratings.”“And he does know bad ratings. He has some of the worst ratings any president has ever had,” Kimmel laughed, referring to Trump’s record-low poll numbers. “So on behalf of all of us, welcome to the crappy ratings club, Mr President.”Late in the monologue, Kimmel offered an explanation to his critics for his continued focus on Trump. “I talk about Trump more than anything because he’s a bully. I don’t like bullies – I played the clarinet in high school.” And Trump, he said, was “an old-fashioned, 80s movie-style bully”.Backing Trump was like “rooting for Biff from Back to the Future”, he added, referring to the villain of the 1985 film. “I don’t know about you, I’m with Marty McFly.”Stephen ColbertStephen Colbert opened Wednesday’s Late Show monologue in a good mood, “because last night our good friend Jimmy Kimmel returned to television”.“Jimmy spoke beautifully about free speech and unity,” he said. “He made great jokes, showed his deep emotions, got huge ratings.”But “that wasn’t the only victory for free speech yesterday”, as a statue depicting Trump and Jeffrey Epstein skipping and holding hands was placed on the National Mall. “It’s a lovely piece, but I’ve gotta say, not very realistic – Trump can’t stand on one leg, not with those cankles!” Colbert joked. “It would be like trying to balance on a sock full of overripe honeydew.”The controversial statue was put up by artists issued an official permit to “demonstrate freedom of speech and artistic expression using political imagery” by the National Park Service. “Good for you, National Park Service,” said Colbert, “and thank you for protecting free speech for almost 24 hours”, because despite the permit allowing the sculpture to stand until Sunday, park police removed it on Wednesday morning.In response, Colbert pretended to navigate the cancellation of Disney+ on his phone – “worked last time!”Park police said the statue was not “in compliance” with the permit, though it did not specify how. “I think we know how it violated the permit,” said Colbert. “We’ve all seen those signs in the national parks: ‘Leave no trace … of the Epstein files.’”Seth MeyersAnd on Late Night, Seth Meyers focused on Trump’s visit to the UN in New York this week. “It’s easy to forget because so much has happened, but when Trump was running for president last year, he was adamant he was going to bring peace to the world,” he reminded viewers before several clips of Trump making such claims as “I will end the chaos in the Middle East quickly” or end the war in Ukraine “in no longer than one day”.“In fairness, he said it would take him one day, he didn’t say which day,” Meyers laughed. But “as a general rule, you should always be skeptical when someone tells you they can solve any problem in one day”.But Trump didn’t focus on any of that at his UN address. Instead, he was thrown off by a broken escalator, which shut down as soon as he stepped on to it. On Fox News, Karoline Leavitt accused the UN of trying to “sabotage” him with the frozen escalator and teleprompter.“Man, you know I’ve heard a lot about these globalists over the years, but I didn’t realize their MO was to just burn you with soft pranks,” Meyers laughed.“Teleprompter down, escalator off. When the president was talking, someone tied his shoelaces together! Are they a shadowy cabal or Kevin from Home Alone?”On Wednesday evening, Trump took to Truth Social to name the escalator episode among three “very sinister events” that took place during his UN visit. He claimed that Melania avoided a “disaster” by not falling “forward onto the sharp edges of these steel steps, face first”. He then called for the arrest of the person responsible for the frozen escalator.A spokesperson for the UN previously blamed Trump’s videographer for the incident, suggesting that they may have “inadvertently triggered” a built-in safety function while proceeding backward up the escalator to film his arrival.Meyers had to laugh: “Oh, hey, look at that – they solved the conflict in one day! How about that?” More

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      They’ve finally gone there: South Park lets rip at Benjamin Netanyahu

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      In the three weeks since South Park last aired, things have changed. The assassination of rightwing pundit Charlie Kirk exploded already fiery political tensions, with the Trump administration and its base embarking on a campaign of retribution the likes of which haven’t been seen since the McCarthy era, and stating, without sufficient evidence, that Kirk’s murder was the result of a wide-ranging leftist plot. Scores of people in the public and private sectors have been punished for commenting on the situation, most notably late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, whose show was briefly pulled off air after the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, put parent company Disney under pressure to do so.Suffice to say, the situation is far too dire to worry about where a cartoon sitcom fits into it all, but South Park is a special case. The first episode of season 27 revolved around the politically motivated cancellation of Stephen Colbert, another late-night talkshow host critical of Donald Trump, while the second directly lampooned Kirk.Many on the right have declared South Park morally complicit in Kirk’s murder, despite the fact that Kirk himself celebrated the parody (going so far as to use its caricature of him as his X profile picture). Repeats of that episode were pulled from Comedy Central, although it remains available to stream on Paramount+. Then, a week to the day after Kirk’s death, it was announced that the new episode of South Park would be postponed. This sparked speculation of censorship, although showrunners Matt Stone and Trey Parker roundly denied this, claiming it was simply a matter of a blown deadline (the result of their famously tight schedule).View image in fullscreenWhile that seems like an all too convenient excuse, Parker and Stone have never backed down from controversy before. Then again, said controversy has never been this furious before, nor hit so close to home for them. The big question ahead of the newest episode was: what would South Park have to say about all this?The answer is … not much.The latest instalment, provocatively titled Conflict of Interest, makes no mention of Kirk, although it does tackle the aftermath in a roundabout way. In one of the two main storylines, Trump, upset over the impending birth of his unholy lovechild with Satan, sets a series of convoluted traps to force an abortion, only for Carr to continually wander into them. By the end of the episode, Carr, badly injured and hosting a brain parasite as a result of toxoplasmosis from being buried in a mountain of cat poo, is at risk of “losing his freedom of speech”.View image in fullscreenDespite avoiding one of the touchiest subjects of the day, South Park steered headlong into another, finally addressing the genocide in Palestine by way of prediction market apps. A bet on one of the platforms – “Will Kyle’s mom strike Gaza and destroy a Palestinian hospital?” – grows so large that Kyle’s mom ends up flying to Israel to put a stop to it.For most of the episode, the outrage is directed at all sides, with Kyle angrily yelling: “Jews and Palestinians are not football teams that you bet on”, and his mother proclaiming: “It’s not Jews versus Palestine, it’s Israel versus Palestine!”However, that outrage is ultimately aimed at a specific party, with Kyle’s mom barging into the office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and letting rip: “Just who do you think you are, killing thousands and flattening neighbourhoods, then wrapping yourself in Judaism like it’s some shield from criticism!” If Netanyahu’s comeuppance isn’t as scatologically extreme as Carr’s, it still provides a fleeting moment of catharsis.While not the most outrageous episode of the season, this may be the funniest, with the Looney Tunes-like gags and the prevalence of JD Vance’s impish caricature both earning huge laughs. And if this week’s South Park didn’t quite meet the moment head-on, neither did it back down. It’s good to know that it will continue to go after Trump and his cronies no matter how hot the political temperature grows.

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      Jimmy Kimmel comeback breaks his YouTube monologue views record

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      So much for low viewership: Jimmy Kimmel’s comeback monologue is now his most-viewed one on YouTube.The nearly 30-minute segment, in which Kimmel acknowledged his suspension by ABC owner Disney under pressure from the Trump administration, clarified his remarks on the killing of Charlie Kirk and passionately defended free speech, racked up more than 15m views in 16 hours.Numerous Jimmy Kimmel Live! sketches, interviews and other short clips have attracted tens of millions of views over the year, but Tuesday night’s segment marked record viewership for one of the comedian’s monologues.His previous most-watched monologue was from another emotional occasion in 2017, when Kimmel revealed the birth of his son Billy with a congenital heart condition that required immediate open-heart surgery. Other highly viewed monologues include Kimmel’s reaction to Will Smith’s infamous slap of Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars (13m views), his response to the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas in 2017 (10m views) and his thoughts on Trump’s re-election last November (9m views).The spike in viewership comes after Disney suspended his late-night show under pressure from the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over his comments on the shooting of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. The decision quickly became a cultural flashpoint, prompting national outcry over free speech and condemnation over the bullying tactics of the Trump administration. Disney reversed course on Monday, following “thoughtful conversations with Jimmy” and pressure from Hollywood stars, free speech advocates, consumer boycotts, union protests and even Republicans like Ted Cruz.Kimmel’s show remains pre-empted on the dozens of ABC affiliate stations owned by the companies Sinclair and Nexstar, which is seeking FCC approval for a $6.2bn merger. Jimmy Kimmel Lives! typically averages about 1.6m broadcast viewers per night, but according to the New York Times, experts expect this tally to be much higher for Tuesday’s show – despite the Nexstar and Sinclair eliminating about 20% of its broadcast audience.Shortly before Tuesday’s show aired, Donald Trump lashed out at the host, a longtime needler and critic, and criticized ABC for allowing his return to broadcast.“I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his ‘talent’ was never there.”“I think we’re going to test ABC out on this,” he added.“Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative,” Trump said, seemingly referring to the settlement he reached with ABC News last year in a defamation lawsuit filed against the network.In his return, Kimmel was neither conciliatory nor fiery. He decried his suspension as “anti-American” – “this show is not important,” he said, “what is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this” – and clarified his stance on Kirk’s death. “It was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything funny about it.”“Nor was it my intention to blame any specific group for the actions of what – it was obviously a deeply disturbed individual,” he added. “That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make, but I understand that to some that felt either ill-timed or unclear, or maybe both. And for those who think I did point a finger, I get why you’re upset. If the situation was reversed, there’s a good chance I’d have felt the same way.”Kimmel also praised Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, for offering the accused killer forgiveness in a televised memorial service over the weekend.“Look, I never imagined I would be in a situation like this,” he later said. “I barely paid attention in school. One thing I did learn from from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Howard Stern, is that a government threat to silence a comedian the president doesn’t like is anti-American … Let’s stop letting these politicians tell us what they want and tell them what we want.”Jimmy Kimmel Live! will air as usual on Wednesday night, except on the 28 affiliates owned by Nexstar and the 38 owned by Sinclair. On Wednesday, Nexstar told Variety that it is “continuing to evaluate the status of ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ on our ABC-affiliated local television stations, and the show will be preempted while we do so. We are engaged in productive discussions with executives at The Walt Disney Company, with a focus on ensuring the program reflects and respects the diverse interests of the communities we serve.” More

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      For comedians around the world, the laughs often end as democracy fades

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      The exiled Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef has experienced firsthand how intolerant governments can silence political satire. And he had a short message this week for those living in an age of Donald Trump’s free speech clampdown: “My Fellow American Citizens,” he wrote on X. “Welcome to my world.”In his attacks on the most prominent of American satirists, the US president has joined a cadre of illiberal and sensitive leaders around the world who will not tolerate a joke.The latest target of what critics say is a campaign to silence dissenting voices was Jimmy Kimmel, who had his late-night ABC talkshow suspended after government pressure. The removal, weeks after the rival network CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert’s satirical show, follows other Trump-led crackdowns on media and academia.Political foes of the US president say the diminishing space for free speech shows Trump’s America is moving towards authoritarianism. Senator Bernie Sanders, speaking to MSNBC, said the country was on a path towards becoming more like oppressive regimes in Russia and Saudi Arabia. “This is just another step forward,” he said.From Egypt’s military ruler, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, to India’s populist prime minister, Narendra Modi, the laughs often end for comedians as democracy dwindles.One of the most famous global comedians to have his life turned upside down by his political satire is Youssef, who first found fame with a TV show panning the Egyptian regime.Known as the “Egyptian Jon Stewart” in reference to the US talkshow host whom he was inspired by (and looks like), Youssef is a former heart surgeon who became a household name.But his satire made him the target of two opposing governments. He was first arrested in April 2013, accused of insulting Islam and Egypt’s then president. Months later, when Sisi took power by force, Youssef had to cancel his show and flee the country.View image in fullscreenYoussef has said his struggle was as much against Egypt’s cloying, conservative culture as its repressive leaders. “We didn’t have a space for satire in Egypt. We carved out our own space. We had to fight for it,” he said in a 2015 interview.“And because there’s no platform, no space or infrastructure for that kind of satire to be accepted, we were basically pushed out … We are up against generations of people who don’t have this kind of mindset. That’s why it was an uphill battle for us.”Comedians elsewhere have often found themselves caught up in nationalist fervour.In India, which has a history of a lively and relatively free public discourse, critics of Modi argue space to criticise the policies of his rightwing nationalist government is shrinking.Comedians and comedy venues have increasingly been caught in the crosshairs since the rise of his Hindu Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), which has ruled for more than a decade.A Muslim comedian was detained by police for weeks in 2021 for allegedly vulgar jokes insulting Hindu gods – despite never having performed at the show. The comedian Vir Das faced a backlash later the same year and police reports filed by BJP officials after a monologue that dealt with the country’s contradictions on women’s rights and religion.View image in fullscreenPolice in Mumbai registered a criminal case against a comedian in 2017 over a tweet of a photo of Modi modified by Snapchat’s popular dog filter, giving him a canine nose and ears.Similar cases have come out in Russia, including a standup of Azerbaijani origin and a citizen of Belarus, Idrak Mirzalizade, who was detained for 10 days and later banned from the country for a joke about open racism in Russia.Comedy, it seems, can also be treated by some as a transnational crime.The Turkish government asked for the prosecution of a German comedian in 2016 for performing a satirical poem about its president. In the late-night programme screened by the German state broadcaster ZDF, Jan Böhmermann sat in front of a Turkish flag beneath a small, framed portrait of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, reading out a poem that accused the president of repressing minorities and “kicking Kurds”.View image in fullscreenErdoğan’s lawyer Michael Hubertus von Sprenger wanted to enforce a complete ban on the poem, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor at the time, was widely criticised for appearing to give in to Ankara’s demands.Böhmermann said at the time he felt Merkel had “filleted me [and] served me up for tea” to Erdoğan, and that she risked damaging freedom of speech in Germany. Charges brought against him were later dropped and he was given police protection. More

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      Seth Meyers: ‘Trump clearly has no answer to Putin’s aggression’

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      As several late-night hosts take a break for the Emmys – which went to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Sunday night – Seth Meyers looked into Donald Trump’s lack of international leadership.Seth MeyersOn Monday’s Late Night, Meyers pointed out the hypocrisy behind the Trump’ administration’s foreign policy agenda. “Trump and the GOP spent years whining that Democrats were supposedly leading from behind, and have now declared that America will be setting the world’s agenda,” he explained. “No more waiting for other countries to act – America acts first and other countries follow us. You got that, world?”Except earlier this week, Trump announced on Truth Social that he was ready to enact sanctions against Russia for flying drones into Poland’s airspace … but not until all Nato nations had agreed to stop buying oil from Russia. As he put it: “I am ready to do major Sanctions on Russia when all NATO Nations have agreed, and started, to do the same thing.”Meyers had to laugh. “I thought America was back? And now you’ll only act if everyone else does it first?” he said. “Trump is using the same logic for American foreign policy that eighth graders use for smoking pot in the local school parking lot – ‘I’ll do it first if you do it first.’ ‘No way, man, you first!’ ‘OK, let’s do it at the same time. I’m ready to go when you are, just say when.’”Meyers also wondered: “Why does the president of the United States write with the uneven grammar and syntax of a scammer sending you a fake job listing?”The sanctions talk heated up because Russia invaded Poland’s airspace with drones, “a dangerous incursion”, Meyers explained, given that Poland is a Nato ally. “But don’t worry, the president reassured everyone and put our minds at ease.”Well … not quite. Asked last week what he thought about Russia’s actions, Trump answered: “It could’ve been a mistake. But regardless I’m not happy about anything having to do with that whole situation. But hopefully it’s going to come to an end.”“What do you mean ‘hopefully’? I thought you were going to end the war on day one and get the Nobel peace prize!” Meyers laughed. “Now you’re talking in vague generalities like a dad whose daughter is dating a biker who did doughnuts on your front lawn – ‘As for the doughnuts, it might have been a mistake, I don’t know. Also might’ve been a mistake when he was screaming fuck you old man and giving me the finger.’”It’s not that Meyers was against sanctions – “I would love it if we had a president who actually pursued serious diplomacy and got Putin himself to come out and reassure the world after encroaching on Nato airspace and threatening global conflict,” he said. “Instead, we have a president who’s less concerned with the boundaries of Nato than he is with the boundaries of the White House ballroom.”“Trump clearly has no answer to Putin’s aggression,” Meyers concluded. “Diplomacy is good, de-escalation is good, but you can’t have either without competence and leadership, and those are just not Trump’s strong suits.” More

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      John Oliver on Trump’s attack on higher education: ‘No capitulation will be enough’

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      On the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looked into the Trump administration’s assault on higher education in the US. “Trump has long held a grudge against higher education, and now that he’s in power, he’s acting on it,” Oliver explained. Among other things, Donald Trump has targeted the billions of dollars granted to universities for scientific research “in order to bend them to his will”.Trump’s “war on higher education” continues a long tradition of conservative distrust of universities. Back in 1972, Richard Nixon said “the professors are the enemy,” and as Oliver noted, Republicans have railed for years against higher education for supposedly wasteful spending on scientific research – think the Fox News fixation on the alleged “shrimp on a treadmill” study – and for being supposed bastions of liberal indoctrination. “Conservatives have long sought to orient universities sharply to the right,” he said. “And in recent years, they’ve seized upon a new justification for doing this – specifically, to ‘combat antisemitism’ in the wake of student protests over Gaza.”Of those protests, Oliver noted: “Multiple things can be true. You can think some critics of the protests were conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and that some are pointing out actual instances of antisemitism. You can also acknowledge that some Jewish students did feel unsafe because of the actions of some protesters and that some protesters were made unsafe by universities calling the police on them. You can also argue that many universities did themselves no favors by failing to figure out a coherent, consistent response.“But none of that nuance has been present in the White House’s response, which has been to suggest the wholesale destruction of certain universities.” Soon after taking office, Trump convened a “Task Force to Combat Antisemitism” backed by Stephen Miller with the goal of targeting certain schools with large protest movements and, to quote its lead Leo Terrell, “taking away their money”.“Look, if colleges were spending all of their federal money on inventing a big automatic antisemitism generator, then yeah, it would make sense to take their money away,” said Oliver. “But the thing is, they’re not doing that, partly because it seems to be Elon Musk’s project.“Instead, the money being taken away is largely going to research studies, and cutting those has nothing to do with antisemitism.”As Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, put it on Face the Nation: “The idea that you are attacking antisemitism by attacking universities, I think is a complete charade. It’s just an excuse for getting universities to conform.”“Right, it’s obviously bullshit,” Oliver confirmed. “The very idea that Trump’s actions are part of some great effort to defend the Jewish people is, as charades go, slightly less convincing than a toddler playing hide-and-seek.”Oliver considered a non-exhaustive list of “telltale signs that this isn’t really about antisemitism concerns”, including but not limited to the fact that Trump reportedly kept a book of Hitler’s speeches next to his bed, dined with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes this summer, brought people into his administration with records of antisemitic comments, reportedly said during his first term that “Hitler did a lot of good things”, and was endorsed in his first campaign by both David Duke and the KKK. “Hearing that Trump is suddenly waging war against antisemites is like hearing that Billy Joel is waging war against dads from Long Island,” he joked.Oliver then looked into exactly what the administration is doing, such as cancelling Columbia’s grants until the school stopped considering race in admissions, paid $200m in fines and reformed their Middle Eastern studies department, among other requirements. The university “caved in about five seconds”, Oliver noted, “officially solidifying Columbia’s reputation as the Little Bitch University, rather than what it was known for before: being the place that Timothée Chalamet went to for five minutes before realizing he didn’t need it”.The capitulation didn’t change anything, either; weeks later, the administration froze all of the university’s remaining funding from the National Institutes of Health, about $700m in total, and threatened the school’s accreditation. “There’s no guarantee the administration is going to stop making demands from Columbia, and why would they when they keep getting met?” said Oliver.The situation, which has caused a chilling effect on campus, “goes much further than Harvard and Columbia”, Oliver explained, as the administration has frozen hundreds of millions in research funds at several other private institutions, and slashed studies at several public universities. Even Northwestern, a school that tried pre-capitulating to the administration by releasing public steps taken to combat antisemitism, was targeted anyway, with over $790m in grants frozen. Those funds have still not been unfrozen, even though the university’s president, Michael Schill, the Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors, stepped down amid forced layoffs.That case, in particular, highlighted for Oliver what the government’s assault on universities was really about. He pointed to a clip of JD Vance from 2021: “We go to the universities, we use the hundreds of billions of dollars that we send to them as leverage and we say: ‘Unless you stop indoctrinating our children, unless you stop indoctrinating our entire society, you don’t get another dime of our money.’”“That is the exact same plan as now, just hastily remodeled to be about ‘fighting antisemitism’, expecting no one to notice,” said Oliver. “It’s basically the rhetorical equivalent of when a random business clearly used to be a Pizza Hut.”The end result, as one researcher put it, is that the “science in this country is going to be destroyed”, which is bad for future innovations as well as for the private sector. One study found that every dollar of medical research funded by the NIH delivered $2.56 in economic activity. “So even if you are someone who hates learning and loves money – and yes, I am talking to one guy in particular here – publicly funded research is just a no-brainer,” said Oliver. “But obviously that is not what this is really about. This is about the right being willing to sacrifice everything, up to and including a generation’s worth of scientific progress, to get what it wants.”“And it is not hard to see what that is. Because when the administration is launching investigations like ‘why aren’t there more white men teaching at Harvard?’, you know what they’re up to,” he continued. “Just like you know what the plan was when they suddenly canceled diversity grants awarded to PhD students who were members of certain racial or ethnic groups, disabled, or from disadvantaged backgrounds.”Where do things go from here? “I don’t really know, and I’m not sure this administration does either,” said Oliver. But “even if there is not a fixed destination, there is a clear direction. And that is they want to turn back a clock that, quite honestly, had taken way too long to move forward, and restore all of academia to being a training ground for those looking to uphold old systems of power instead of questioning them.”In conclusion, he added: “You can have problems with academia. You can think it’s too cloistered or too liberal. You can think it’s becoming too expensive or that its resources are misallocated. But the notion of the state suddenly executing a sweeping takeover of higher education to this degree is chilling.”Based on everything that has happened so far, “no capitulation will be enough, and they will never stop demanding more.” Given that, Oliver argued, universities should “stop yielding, stand firm and fight back” because although it is tempting to think one more capitulation will safeguard your independence, “it’s worth asking at what point have you compromised so much that the thing you’re supposed to be defending is gone.” More

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      South Park has become the most important TV show of the Trump 2.0 era | Jesse Hassenger

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      I’ll admit it: I’m more of a Simpsons guy than a South Park guy. Nothing really against those South Park guys – I’ve caught plenty of episodes over its astonishing near-30-year run, and loved the 1999 big-screen movie. But while I haven’t always maintained clockwork viewership of The Simpsons, either, those characters have proved durable enough to revive my interest in episodes old and new. South Park has a thinner bench by comparison, and as the show itself astutely pointed out years ago, it’s difficult for a satirically minded animated sitcom to explore ground that The Simpsons hasn’t covered already. South Park’s political bent, too, has often seemed less varied than the warmer (but still sometimes cutting) social ribbing of Matt Groening’s signature show. It’s a fine line between omnidirectional satire and libertarian crankiness.And yet the 27th season of South Park has accomplished something vanishingly few of its peers, whether in animation or topical comedy, have been able to do: getting laughs taking shots at the second Trump administration. It’s not that the White House is beyond reproach. Quite the opposite problem, much-documented: the Donald Trump cabal is so outsized in its stupidity and cruelty that it’s hard to distend it into a “funny” caricature, even a bleak one. In Trump’s second term, it has only gotten bleaker; jokes that were worn out by the end of 2020 are getting retold with a nasty vengeance, and the bar for cathartic laughter has been raised considerably.For a comedy fan, this winds up translating to an aversion. The occasional shots taken by The Simpsons somehow don’t land as squarely as they did when aimed at presidents I liked much, much more. I watch Saturday Night Live every week, and mostly dread James Austin Johnson’s accurate but ultimately defanged impression. (Some weeks, Johnson himself seems bummed out to be doing it.) I respect the hell out of Stephen Colbert, but I have never sought out his Trump commentary; I don’t need any more clapter – the reaction encouraged by comedy that wants your approval more than your laughter – in my life. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone seemed to agree; Parker’s 2017 announcement that they’d grown bored of taking shots at Trump – then barely into his first presidential term – was one of the show’s many controversies over the years.So how is it that South Park’s revived anti-Trump blows this season have managed to land? A big part of it is precisely Stone and Parker’s allergy to clapter and the grandstanding that inspires it. They obviously resent anything they read as putting on airs and sometimes in the past, this came across as its own form of preachiness, with “everybody chill”-style speeches at an episode’s end that would secretly sound just as prescriptive as the self-righteousness they wanted to send up. With their most recent Trump parody, though, there isn’t much moralizing – just gratifyingly mean caricatures of deserving figures such as Trump, JD Vance and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem. Some (not all) of their past roastings have verged on point-and-laugh bullying; here are targets worthy of that derision.Some of this derision speaks through the language of South Park itself. Trump isn’t vocally or visually imitated; he’s depicted in a series of repurposed photos, with the same voice and animation technique that Parker and Stone used to bring Saddam Hussein to life in the South Park movie. He’s also given the same sexual partner: a muscled-up and put-upon version of Satan, who has found himself in another toxic relationship. Calling Trump a wannabe dictator doesn’t break new ground, but there’s something satisfying in Stone and Parker using their personal toolkit to draw a line between Trump and Hussein; if they thought it was a histrionic comparison, they’d be making fun of it instead of making it. Similarly, there’s real spite animating the depiction of Noem as a dog-murdering zealot whose glamorous face needs to be repeatedly lacquered and reaffixed to her head as she commands an army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs.Not all of the season’s satire has involved making real-life figures regulars on the show. Because South Park’s ensemble has rarely felt as vast or believably developed as Springfield of The Simpsons (or even Arlen on King of the Hill), it’s also flexible enough to turn Randy, Stan’s desperately trend-following dad, into a ketamine-microdosing, tech-bro moron addicted to the soothing, empty reassurances of ChatGPT – the focus of the most recent episode, to the point where most of the core child cast doesn’t appear. Surprisingly, this season has deployed forever favorite Cartman more sparingly so far, again getting self-referential in the season’s second episode, where the id-driven and arguably evil little kid is incensed to find out that podcasters have stolen his “shtick” – his pervasive hatefulness, repackaged as a challenge to debate where the aggressor is always the self-appointed winner. Ascribing this “master debater” title to Cartman (alongside a fellow kid serving as an obvious Charlie Kirk/Ben Shapiro stand-in) somehow manages to make this ridiculous behavior funny in its petty smallness without glorifying it.A South Park diehard would probably describe this praise as a fair-weather fan only enjoying the show when it goes after the “right” targets. Maybe that’s true, but it’s also a lot easier to take some joy in savaging Vance as a meme-faced version of a Fantasy Island sidekick than, say, accusing George Lucas and Steven Spielberg of cultural rape. It’s probably wishful thinking to wonder if Parker and Stone might actually move the needle of the perception on tech bros, debate-me podcasters and Trump-world ghouls, especially among the dude demo. But it’s also just a blessed change of pace to see say-anything, first-amendment types finding a fresher target than the wokeness bogeyman. While countless standups continue to whine about being silenced, Parker and Stone seem highly aware of their rarified position (and, as Paramount contractors, also aware of what actual political-corporate interference looks like). In a world where Trump’s actual political opponents seem terrified to actually fight him, some well-deserved, point-and-laugh meanness has become a surprising novelty. More

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      ‘It felt like a scene from The Handmaid’s Tale’: US comics on the dangers of political satire

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      In April, comedian Jena Friedman had a strange encounter in Vancouver airport. She had just performed a Ted talk about the future of comedy and was heading home to the US, when someone she thought worked for airport security quizzed her about her visit.Thinking he was probing for visa infringements, “I just said I was doing comedy. Then he asked: ‘What do you joke about?’ Stupidly, I lightly flirted with him, and was like: ‘Everything other than airport security!’ He didn’t react at all. Then I realised he was US border control. He asked again: ‘What do you joke about?’”Friedman is a veteran of The Daily Show and The Late Show, and her standup comedy often features excoriating routines at the expense of the political establishment. “I just froze because I am a political comedian and I didn’t know what to say. Then he said: ‘Do you joke about politicians?’”She made it home, but the incident stuck with her. Friedman lives in LA, and the recent actions of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement “detaining anyone and everyone who looks a certain way” put her on high alert. “It was such a quick, on its face benign, interaction,” she says. “But it did feel like a scene out of The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m a blonde, white woman who looks like a Republican’s wife and I have an American passport. But what if I had said ‘Yes?’ Don’t we want to live in a country where we can joke about politicians, where we can joke about anything?”View image in fullscreenFriedman incorporated that moment into her new standup show, Motherf*cker, which she’s performing at the Edinburgh fringe. The show is a change of pace. She’s generally resisted getting personal on stage, resenting the idea that women have to be relatable to succeed in comedy, but this time it felt unavoidable, as she explores the life-changing experience of becoming a parent while her own mother was dying. “It’s about grief, but it’s also political,” she says. “The vibe in certain circles does feel like we’re grieving. So there’s something about my show that’s connecting to the larger moment.”Friedman is among a crop of US comedians with roots in topical comedy appearing at this year’s fringe. Another stalwart of US political comedy, Michelle Wolf, is back, too, while standup and former Saturday Night Live writer Sam Jay is making her festival debut.Wolf earned her stripes on The Daily Show and Late Night with Seth Myers, and gained notoriety with her 2018 set at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which she roasted Trump and his collaborators. These days, she lives in Barcelona, although returns to the US regularly for comedy work. She’s yet to encounter border trouble but, with reports of people with green cards and citizens being detained, she says: “I’m keeping an eye on it.”Comedians Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres have both said that the state of US politics has forced them out of the country – O’Donnell to Ireland and DeGeneres to England. O’Donnell has written a show on just that, which she performed for the first week of the fringe. Wolf is happy with her move to Barcelona, and feels her comedy has benefited from other cultural perspectives, but returns to the US because “the audiences are great” and there’s plenty of work. While other US comedians have also discussed the idea of moving to Europe, she thinks it won’t happen until there’s “an impetus to go, something I don’t think is far off, like: you can’t talk about this any more, you can’t talk about that any more”.Last month, satirist Stephen Colbert announced that network CBS had cancelled The Late Show after 33 years. Many thought the timing, three days on from Colbert criticising CBS parent company Paramount for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump, was suspect. Fellow late-night talkshow host Jon Stewart criticised the move on his podcast and pointed to wider fear across the industry.: “There are a lot of things that will never be made, that you will never know about, that will be killed in the bed before they ever had a chance because of this chilling effect.”Friedman’s glad to see Colbert and Stewart speaking out against Trump and his administration – and agrees there’s a “chill”. “The industry has already been less supportive of political comedy than they were under Biden and Obama. However, “seeing the most prominent comedians taking [Trump] to task, like Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker] from South Park, Colbert and Stewart, that gives me hope”.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Michelle Wolf’s standup merges the personal and political and her podcast, Wolf’s Thought Box, tackles current affairs. Her new show, which she’s performing while eight months pregnant at the fringe, explores life and society “through the lens of being a mom now”. There are punchlines on societal pressures for working mothers, home birth, momfluencers, gender inequalities and more. “We’re in an era now where people are talking about motherhood realistically and that’s very refreshing,” she says.Still, political comedy isn’t absent. “I feel like I have to address the whole America and Trump thing … people expect me to say something about it.” She plans to tailor topical jokes to the day’s news but, “I don’t like making it a large part of my set, because it bores me. There’s always something crazy happening, but it’s hard to come up with creative angles other than: can you believe this?”It’s been nine years since she first started writing jokes about Trump and, in that time, her life has transformed – she met her partner, moved abroad, and is about to have her second child. Her main feeling now is: “How are we still talking about him? How are we still in the same spot?”Jay reflects that slow build in her show, We the People, in which she explores the state of America – looking back to the “unconfident whites” who founded the nation. She describes the show as “a fun, risky little ride” as she tries to get to the root of why the US feels so divided, and what we can do to better understand one another. “It’s this broader conversation I’ve been having about America and race,” Jay says.The whole world feels unsettled right now and there’s an inability to consider other perspectives, Jay says. “How did we get here as Americans? Of course, I think race plays a large part in it. And how did these race relations get to the way they are? Not just blaming white people, but exploring the type of white people we’re dealing with, why they might be the way they are, their roots in England.”Trump came up plenty during Jay’s time on SNL and appears in her fringe show as a “braggadocious” fool, unable to keep state secrets, yet smartly appealing to the frustrations of America’s poor white communities. But the conditions that created and elevated Trump are more interesting to Jay: “He’s the symptom of this, not the cause. This is a result of years and years of us doing it wrong … it’s been building for a long time and for a lot of different reasons.”Friedman agrees: “I started working at the Daily Show in 2012, I was at Letterman before that, so I started looking at politics on a daily basis since 2010, and this is a long time coming.” This also means that, among US audiences, not everyone wants political comedy. “They’re always looking for escapism. In the first term, there was definite Trump fatigue,” Friedman says. “As a political comic, I’ve always done better in the UK than the US. It’s the UK audiences who are like: what the hell’s going on over there?” says Friedman.The mood in US comedy is, Jay says, “the mood in America … chaos. There’s no way to keep up. People are also very desensitised. Shit just keeps happening in more extreme ways that people are losing a metric for it.”All three agree that comedy can help share differing worldviews. “Even if it’s people we disagree with, the sign of a healthy democracy is when people can safely be on stage saying whatever we want, ideally in good faith,” Friedman says. “I support all comedians, I support freedom of expression and I want to see more of it. I want to see people more open to people they disagree with. Whenever I do political comedy, the goal is not to preach to the choir, it’s to get people to see things slightly differently.”Jay has said that comedy can be a tool for empathy. “I look at it as a conversation. It can serve a purpose of actual understanding, understanding that we’re all humans trying to figure out a thing that doesn’t make a lot of sense – existing. Everybody is grappling with these things in their own way.”What does the future hold for US comedians? “It’s too soon to tell,” says Friedman. “But I think everybody exercising the US first amendment in a way that’s funny and disarming is really important right now.”Jay says: “Once I’m on stage, I’m gonna say what I’m gonna say. If I can’t come back as a result, I’ll just have to have my girlfriend come meet me in Scotland.” More