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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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      From South Park v Trump to AI slopaganda: deepfakes are now part of the news cycle, for better and for worse | Anna Broinowski

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      Salman Rushdie believes AI will not be a threat to authors until ChatGPT can write “a funny book”. His faith in human over synthetic creativity may hold some truth in the literary space. But on our screens – from film, art and satire to the algorithmically turbo-charged, factually opaque, monetised churn of the 24/7 news cycle – AI is already making us laugh.Deepfakes – synthetic audio and video of people doing and saying things they never said or did – are the chief comedic disruptors in a suite of increasingly persuasive AI tools shaping the post-truth reality envisioned by the Microsoft engineer Eric Horvitz, where fact and fiction are indistinguishable. In eight short years, deepfakes have risen from cultural outlier to mainstream meme, embodying the futurist Roy Amara’s Law: we overestimate the effects of new technology in the short run but underestimate its long-term impacts.And with some experts predicting 90% of online content could be AI-generated by 2027, the extent to which synthetic replicas will change how we trust and interact with on-screen depictions of real people is now an urgent question for creators, policymakers and viewers.When deepfakes emerged in 2017 as incel-produced nonconsensual porn, the alarm they generated was justified. But as soon as deepfakes started being used a political tool, concerns snowballed into panic. Philosophers labelled them an “epistemic threat” to evidentiary systems; corporations mounted costly (and unsuccessful) detection programs; and pundits warned of an “info-apocalypse”, in which a convincing deepfake of a world leader could start world war three. Less dramatic but equally chilling was the prediction that the mere awareness of deepfakes would collapse civic trust altogether. In 2018 Jordan Peele made a prophetic deepfake of Obama urging viewers to rely on credible news sources, lest we become a “fucked up dystopia”.Cut to 2025, and satirical deepfakes are part of the news cycle. Shortly after attending Pope Francis’ funeral, the US president, Donald Trump, posted a viral deepfake of himself in papal regalia. In response to Doge cuts to public services, a deepfake of Trump fellating Elon Musk’s foot appeared on a DC government lobby screen. After Trump’s declaration he would transform Gaza into a Middle Eastern “Riviera”, a satirical deepfake appeared on Instagram showing Trump sipping cocktails with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in an AI-slop fantasy of Gaza as a beachside resort, full of gold Trump statues and happy Palestinian children. And just last month, South Park’s deepfake of Trump with a micro-penis elicited an official rebuke from the White House.Deepfakes have been disrupting democratic processes since 2018, when Indian nationalists circulated a deepfake porn video of the journalist Rana Ayyub, in an attempt to silence her. But the elevation of deepfake satire as a weapon in mainstream politics is a more recent trend. During the 2024 US election campaign, Trump posted absurdist deepfakes of Kamala Harris addressing a communist rally and admitting she was a DEI hire. A surreal Republican attack ad showed a deepfake Joe Biden winning the presidency and its AI-imagined consequences: war with Taiwan, bank closures and US cities destroyed by crime. Echoing warnings that the rise of deepfakes could be used to discredit authentic recordings, Trump falsely accused Harris of deepfaking her crowd sizes.And AI “slopaganda” is coming for Trump too. Viral platforms Make AI Great Again and Global Presidents are generating billions of views for videos featuring a panoply of strongmen – from Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy to Kim Jong-un – emasculating Trump in slapstick pranks. (That Chinese leader Xi Jinping is largely absent from these clips has prompted speculation about their origins and goals.)In stark contrast to this perniciously populist deepfakery, progressive artists and activists are using AI counterfeits to provoke, astonish and speak truth to power. Stephanie Lepp’s Deepfake Reckonings imagines a “morally courageous” US justice Brett Kavanaugh; and Kendrick Lamar’s The Heart music video deepfakes him as OJ Simpson and Kobe Bryant, to destabilise assumptions about black identity. Compil des Bleues inserts the faces of France’s soccer stars on to the bodies of its female World Cup team, to highlight the women’s equal athleticism; while the Lincoln Project’s posthumous deepfake of Trump’s father, Fred, labels his son “a fuck up”, “trash” and “a disgrace”; declaring “I’ve been dead for 30 years and I’m still ashamed of you.”Professional film-makers are also manipulating deepfakes to play with the truth. Black Mirror’s Joan is Awful depicts a matryoshka-like dystopia where characters are deepfakes of deepfakes; Sassy Justice by the South Park creators portrays Trump as a corruption-slaying TV journalist; and the Polish biopic Putin delivers an unflinching AI portrait of its titular hero. The documentary Welcome to Chechnya deploys deepfake masks to protect its persecuted gay subjects, while A Life Uncharted uses real audio of its deceased protagonist, Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson, to construct a candid deepfake interview.Deepfakes come with very real risks that demand urgent regulation: cybercrime, corporate fraud, intimate image-abuse and political disinformation among them. But it is vital that AI’s escalating persuasive power is regulated without stifling creativity and innovation.On this, at least, film-makers and big tech are aligned. When xAI unveiled its new Grok AI tool, German satirists used it to make a deepfake of Elon Musk committing an armed robbery – and thanked him for supporting free speech.

      Dr Anna Broinowski is a film-maker, author and synthetic media researcher at the University of Sydney. She will be speaking on a panel about AI at Curious festival, held at Sydney Opera House on Sunday 28 September 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.

      South Park is on Paramount+ More

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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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      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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      John Oliver on Ice’s crackdown: ‘Trying to drive up arrests at all costs’

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      John Oliver took a hard look at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) on the latest Last Week Tonight, as more and more videos of Ice raids across US cities continue to show a brutal crackdown on undocumented people. “For all the administration’s talk of targeting dangerous criminals, the reality is very different,” Oliver started.The Trump administration has set a goal of deporting one million people a year, “which, it’s worth noting, would be more than double the previous record of 400,000 when Obama was president, which was already very high”, said Oliver. “But notably, they don’t seem to be getting near their target numbers.” As of taping, the administration had deported about 280,000 people, “so getting to a million in just six months seems very unlikely”.“And they have backed themselves into this corner, because ‘promising’ to deport a million criminal migrants is one thing, but once you’re in charge, you then have to find that many of them,” he continued, “which is going to be hard if they don’t exist in the numbers that you’re claiming, which they don’t.“It’s like promising to apprehend 10,000 Fred Dursts a day,” he added. “There just aren’t that many out there, so either you have to admit that your target number was bullshit in the first place or you have to drastically widen your definition of what a Fred Durst is until you’re eventually arresting any gen X-er wearing a hat.“But instead of conceding their numbers were inflated, the administration is trying to drive up arrests at all costs.” The Trump aide Stephen Miller has instructed Ice agents to target Home Depots and 7-Elevens, and the agency has rapidly deputized a record number of local police to function as deportation agents. They have brought in border patrol as well as the national guard; at least a quarter of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s workforce; 80% of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and even members of the US Postal Service.“This mass reallocation of resources means that other crimes are going less policed,” Oliver explained. The FBI, for example, has instructed agents to prioritize immigration enforcement at the expense of white-collar crime and investigations into sexual abuse.“I gotta say: for a guy who pandered so heavily to people convinced pedophiles, sex offenders and traffickers had infiltrated our government, Trump’s sure making the government a lot friendlier to them,” said Oliver. “Ghislaine Maxwell’s in a nicer cell now, Lawrence Taylor’s advising on kids’ physical fitness. Fuck it, at this point, if he’s willing to wear a Maga hat, I really don’t see why Roman Polanski can’t come back.”Nevertheless, “border czar” Tom Homan claimed that 70% of those arrested by Ice were criminals, while the other 30% were national security threats who “don’t have a criminal history because they try to lay low until it’s time for them to do things bad”.“Under his logic, I guess anyone could be a national security threat,” said Oliver. But “Homan’s numbers are also nowhere near Ice’s own data,” which found that only 40% of those arrested had any criminal history, including traffic infractions, and just 7% were convicted of any sort of violent crime. In fact, as of June, people with only civil or immigration violations – no criminal convictions – made up the largest percentage of arrests nationwide. “Maybe the clearest sign that this is more about pushing up numbers than catching violent criminals on the run is that one of the key places where they’re now fishing for arrests is immigration court, where people show up for their hearings,” he added.As numerous videos showed, Ice agents arrested people who showed up to process their situation legally, using a loophole that allows the government to deport people without due process if their immigration case is dismissed. “It is the laziest possible way to juice up your numbers,” said Oliver, “because you’re targeting people who are going through the system ‘in the right way’ and turning them into people you can immediately arrest and deport.”This trap was among “things the administration is doing that sure feel like they’re breaking the law” but “often aren’t”. Oliver took the “dystopian visual” of Ice agents wearing masks, which is actually legal, as no federal law prevents it. “So they can do it, but why are they?” The administration claims that it’s for their own protection, with the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, including videotaping arrests as an act of “violence” against agents.All of this “gets even more worrying” when one remembers that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a huge surge of funding for immigration enforcement – roughly $170bn over the next few years, some of which is set aside for the hiring of 10,000 new Ice agents. “For what it’s worth, massive rapid hiring sprees never tend to work out well,” Oliver noted. Past efforts to bolster Customs and Border Protection under George Bush ended up with hiring drug cartel members and an actual serial killer. “And it’s not a great sign for who Ice is appealing to that they’re currently posting gross recruitment ads, like this fake minivan ad tagged: ‘Think about how many criminal illegal aliens you could fit in this bad boy!’” he added. “And they seem more than a little desperate already, as they’ve already removed age limits for hiring agents.”And this past week, Ice shared a video of their newest recruit: former Superman actor Dean Cain. “You know, there’s an old saying in Hollywood: ‘If all you can get is Dean Cain, you are fucked,’” Oliver joked.“Now, I’m not saying that Ice isn’t finding people,” he continued. “I’m just saying, when you are reduced to pinning a badge on the 59-year-old star of The Dog Who Saved Christmas, The Dog Who Saved Christmas Vacation, The Dog Who Saved the Holidays, The Dog Who Saved Halloween, The Dog Who Saved Easter and The Dog Who Saved Summer, maybe you are in trouble. Although, on the plus side, no need for that guy to wear a mask because the chances of anyone recognizing him are fucking zero.”So what can be done? “As powerless as this can feel, as individuals there are still actions you can take,” said Oliver, such as recording any arrest you witness involving Ice agents. Oliver also advised that if you’re approached by Ice agents, whether or not you’re a citizen, “attorneys told us the only two things you should say to them are: ‘Am I free to leave?’ And: ‘I want to speak to a lawyer.’ That’s it. You have the right to remain silent. And I recognize that in some cases you may be unable to help yourself from saying: ‘Didn’t you used to be Superman?’ ‘I thought you died.’ ‘I can’t believe I’m meeting a film-maker.’ But that really is it.”“We are still in a very grim moment,” he added. “The rightwing narrative is that most people are rabid to punish anyone who wants to become new Americans. But that is just not true,” as new polls found 80% support a pathway to legal citizenship for undocumented immigrants. “Nor are their bullshit claims about who’s being targeted and arrested.“And I’m not saying that everything Ice is doing right now is illegal,” he concluded. “What I’m saying is, a whole bunch of it feels like it really should be. And we need to change that at our earliest opportunity.” More