Late-night hosts learning
The late-night talk show landscape is mostly white and mostly male. So as the U.S. grapples with its racist past and present, and protests against police brutality roil cities from coast to coast (and around the world), punchlines from middle-aged, rich white guys weren’t going to cut it. And they knew it.
This past week, big-name hosts Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’brien, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert and James Corden ditched the celebrity shmoozing for serious conversations about white privilege.
Corden began The Late Late Show Monday with a sombre tone: “We usually start with a segment called ‘Three Things to Cheer You Up.’ I think it’s fair to say we don’t have three things to cheer you up today. I’ve been struggling all weekend wondering what to say to you here tonight because who needs my opinion?”
Who, indeed? Silence, concluded Corden and his fellow hosts, was not the answer. But neither was business as usual.
Black voices filled in the latenight spaces usually occupied by monologues and rim shots. NAACP president Derrick Johnson, CNN’S Don Lemon and Van Jones, Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che, actress Leslie Jones and W. Kamau Bell were among those to take deep dives into structural racism.
On Monday, The Tonight Show’s Fallon told viewers he wasn’t “going to have a normal show” and kicked off the episode with an apology, addressing an old SNL sketch that had resurfaced in which the comedian donned blackface to impersonate his good friend Chris Rock.
“The thing that haunted me the most was, how do I say I love this person? I respect this guy more than I respect most humans. I am not a racist,” said Fallon, adding he had been advised to stay quiet lest he get himself into more hot water.
“I realized that the silence is the biggest crime that white guys like me and the rest of us are doing: staying silent. We need to say something. We need to keep saying something. And we need to stop saying ‘That’s not OK’ more than just one day on Twitter.”