TV hosts chat about new fears
AS THE two late-night comedians sat across from each other onstage at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center here on Saturday night, Stephen Colbert asked John Oliver why he had not yet been given a commitment for four more seasons.
“There’s a clear road that you can put your foot out,” said Colbert, host of The Late Show on CBS.
Oliver, anchor of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, replied brightly but fatalistically: “The kind of road that Thelma and Louise drove off.”
Though they didn’t spell it out, the two were talking about the victory of president-elect Donald Trump, who, after a monthslong barrage of jokes from these and other hosts, is about to assume the highest office in the land.
This live conversation, which was booked several weeks ago and billed with the title “Wow, That Was Weird: A Post-Election Evening With Stephen Colbert and John Oliver,” was meant to be a kind of comic catharsis for the hosts and their audience, many of whom expected Hillary Clinton to win the presidency.
But the event played more like a group-therapy session than what it was, a benefit for the Montclair Film Festival, where Colbert’s wife, Evelyn, is president of its board.
The hosts traded jokes about their lives, careers and current events. But they did not mince words when it came to their anxiety about Trump’s election, urging audience members not to become complacent.
In recent days, Colbert said, there has been “a transformation going on in the emotional state of the audience” for his show.
Oliver said soberly, “Someone who’s always acted like the most powerful man in the world has now actually become the most powerful man in the world.”
His show, and Colbert’s show, will “need to work out what we become next”, Oliver said.
These alumni of The Daily Show, Comedy Central’s longrunning news satire, find themselves at different places in their professional trajectories. Oliver has enjoyed widespread critical praise for Last Week Tonight, a weekly half-hour show that recently won the Emmy Award for out- standing variety talk series.
Colbert, who was largely invincible when he played a fake conservative pundit on The Colbert Report, is trying to strike the right tone on The Late Show, an hourlong network talk show that runs five nights a week. He is coming off a live election-night special, broadcast on Showtime, that became increasingly surreal and funereal as the program wore on.
Oliver said that it had not been much fun to write jokes about the brutal presidential campaign.
Usually in his line of work, he said: “You try and take things of substance and then put some sugar on it to make it palatable. But there was so little of substance, this whole campaign, it’s just like a diabetes-inducing amount of sugar. Your job kind of flips on its head.”
Somewhat facetiously, Oliver, who is a British citizen, talked about whether his frequent comedic jabs at Trump might mean that he now has to return to his home country.
“I’m sure he can take a joke,” Oliver said, adding: “No, we know that’s not true, either.”
Colbert asked him, “Are you peering out the windows?”
Oliver replied, “No, but one day, like Jurassic Park, maybe I’ll see the water shifting and go, ‘Here they come’.” (He noted that his wife, who is American, was his “legal parachute”.)
When Colbert asked how Americans could resist the inclination to normalise Trump’s most extreme viewpoints and policies without living perpetually “at an adrenaline fever pitch”, Oliver answered that it was dangerous to overlook the pain of people whose lives and routines are “going to be shattered”.
Discussing the apparent rise of websites that traffic bogus news stories, Colbert objected to this content being described as “fake news”.
Referring to his and Oliver’s time at The Daily Show, he said: “What we did was fake news. We got on TV and we said: ‘This is all going to be fake. We’re going to make fun of news’.”
Colbert added, “The fact that they call this stuff fake news upsets me, because this is just lying.”
Oliver said Britain was swept up in a similar atmosphere of media distrust this summer, just before “Brexit”, the vote in favor of withdrawing from the European Union.
At the end of the evening, the two fielded questions from audience members. When one audience member asked just how much trouble they thought the nation was in, the hosts seemed to find it difficult to be humourous.
“I’m all for giving him a chance,” Colbert said of Trump, “but don’t give him an inch. Because I believed everything he said, and I remember everything he said. And it’s horrifying.”
Colbert said that although “everybody tried to stop Trump”, he prevailed nonetheless.
“He owes the checks and balances of Washington nothing, because they tried to stop him and they couldn’t,” he said. “And he’s a vindictive person.”
“So, it’s all going to be fine,” he said archly, to some laughter. “Merry Christmas.”