Stephen Colbert: ‘Even the coronavirus is pitching a sequel’
Stephen Colbert kicked off Monday’s Late Show with concerning updates on the coronavirus, as cases rose in all 50 states over the last week. The increase is largely due to the more transmissible Delta variant, which “sounds like a frat house that’s a disease vector,” he said. “So … a frat house.”
The surge has led Los Angeles county to reinstate indoor mask requirements regardless of vaccination status. “Typical Los Angeles – even the virus is pitching a sequel.”
The vast majority of infections have been among unvaccinated people, adding pressure to the Biden administration to combat vaccine hesitancy fostered by rampant misinformation online, particularly on Facebook. This week, the US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, warned that misinformation was a “serious threat to public health”.
“Makes you miss the good old days when Facebook’s primary function was helping you find unflattering pictures of your ex’s new boyfriend,” Colbert added.
The virus has also threatened the Olympics on the eve of their kick-off in Tokyo; on Monday, the number of Covid cases linked to the Olympics rose to 61. “I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: it was wrong to make tonsil hockey an Olympic sport,” said Colbert. “At this rate there’s not going to be any healthy humans left to compete in the Games.
“The Olympics organizers are doing everything they can to prevent the spread of Covid,” he added, as rumors circulated that the International Olympic Committee outfitted the Olympic Village with “anti-sex” beds designed to collapse under the weight of more than one person. “Yes, because we know if there is one thing world-class athletes can’t do, it’s have sex in unusual positions,” Colbert quipped.
Factcheckers later debunked the anti-sex rumors, claiming the beds were made of cardboard so that they could be recycled into paper products after the Olympics. “I can’t wait for six months from now to read toilet paper labels that read ‘made from 100% recycled Olympic sex bed’,” Colbert joked. “And athletes, remember: if you’re recycling, you have to break down your Olympic sex bed.”
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers discussed a report that Donald Trump has struggled to sell advance tickets for a series of rallies with the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, billed as “The History Tour”. In Orlando, where the duo will host an event on 12 December at the 20,000-capacity Amway Center, a box office employee told Politico that there were “still a lot of tickets open. We have concerts that are doing a lot better than this.”
“I’m sure they do,” said Meyers. “First of all, it’s in Orlando. There’s a wealth of theme parks. Why go to a Trump/O’Reilly history tour when you can learn more about American history at the Hall of Presidents or even Space Mountain. Hell, even Sea World would be a better use of your time. Either way, you’re gonna be in the splash zone.
“Who the hell wants to go see a so-called history tour with a disgraced former cable news host and a man who was just quoted as having said ‘I think it would be hard if George Washington came back from the dead and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice-president. I think it would be very hard for them to beat me.’
“A history tour with Trump is like the opposite of a Ken Burns documentary,” he added. “Let’s remember, Trump thought Frederick Douglass was still alive and thought the civil war happened for no reason.”
In response to the Politico story, O’Reilly, who was fired from Fox News in 2017 after it was revealed the network paid $32m to settle a sexual harassment claim, threatened to sue the reporter and called low ticket sales “bullshit”. When asked how many tickets were sold, he said he didn’t know.
“It’s nice to know O’Reilly hasn’t chilled out even a little bit given all that time to relax after he got canned,” Meyers deadpanned. “I guess part of me thought when you get forced out and publicly disgraced the way O’Reilly did, you might take up yoga or meditation. Although even if he did, he’d probably still do it angrily.
“It makes sense that ticket sales are slow, because even the people who want to go see Trump don’t want a history lecture,” Meyers continued. “They want him to get up on stage and say crazy shit about celebrities he met in 1982.”