Late Night Last Week: Taylor Swift Makes the Rounds

Late Night Last Week: Josh Johnson Proves He is No One-Hit Wonder, Kimmel Keeps Talking Free Speech, and More

Each week, Late Night Last Week highlights some of the best late night TV from the previous week. This week, we cover Josh Johnson’s second turn hosting The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel’s questioning of Aziz Ansari over the Riyadh Comedy Festival, Taylor Swift’s takeover of NBC, and John Oliver’s monologue on Bari Weiss heading CBS News.

To a first-time viewer, it may be hard to believe that last week, Josh Johnson was hosting The Daily Show for only the second time.

Everything about his work behind the desk: his cadence, mannerisms, the adaptation of his must-watch stand-up work on current events (new material from which, if you’re not aware, is uploaded to YouTube almost daily) and style for the monologue, has the feel of a veteran with the flare of a newcomer. The show’s rotating cast of hosts only grows stronger.

In his October 8 monologue, Johnson got right to the moment from the week’s news cycle that became fodder for comedians everywhere, including Amy Poehler on the latest episode of Saturday Night Live: Attorney General Pam Bondi’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, during which she refused to answer questions about her conversations with President Trump about the Epstein files. Johnson brilliantly captured the spirit of the exchange.

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“You know you’re caught when you have to repeat what you were being accused of back to the person, just so you have time to think,” Johnson observed. “Who’s been texting me? Who’s been texting me all night? You want to see my text messages?… A man can’t even type anymore. This used to be a free country.”

Johnson then pivoted to discussing the efforts of House Speaker Mike Johnson to delay a vote on releasing the files. The host was dismayed. “You’d think someone who looks like an 11-year-old boy would care about pedophilia,” he said.

As absurd as it may seem, the end of this week will mark one month since Jimmy Kimmel’s indefinite suspension from ABC. In that time, not only has Kimmel returned as a triumphant, cultural barometer for the status of free speech in the country, not only did he pack theaters in Brooklyn as part of an east coast victory tour, but he also managed to set new September records for his show in the time slot, besting his frenemies Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon.

And while Kimmel’s show has seen a natural decline in ratings following his post-suspension return, Jimmy Kimmel Live! has managed to keep things interesting, generating genuine buzz for, fittingly, another free speech-related topic. On October 8, Kimmel chatted with comedian Aziz Ansari, who was among the many stand-ups to play at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which stretched from the end of last month into the beginning of this one in October.

Apart from Kimmel, the festival has been the talk of the internet, with some of the most famous stand-up comics in the world on the hot seat for taking money from the Saudi government. On his program, Kimmel, with a light touch, pressed Ansari about his decision to perform at a festival funded by, in his words, “a pretty brutal regime.” “They’ve done a lot of horrible, horrible things,” he added.

Ansari defended his decision, citing personal connections to the country, saying that not all citizens there agree with the regime, and that he planned to donate a portion of the money to organizations like Human Rights Watch, as some of the other comedians promised to do. Human Rights Watch, however, put out a statement saying they would refuse donations from any comics who attended.

For his part, Kimmel pressed Ansari, not merely moving on after one half-asked question—“So what do you say to the haters?!”—as today’s talk show hosts so often do. And though not overly confrontational, Kimmel got explicit, citing, for example, the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi as one instance of the regime’s horrors. The questioning was important for the national discourse and made for interesting TV. Kimmel, for now, is on a roll.

Meanwhile, over on NBC, the week belonged to one woman: Taylor Swift. And boy was it a tale of two broadcasts. On Monday, she appeared with Jimmy Fallon, walking out to what the host described as “loudest intro in the history of The Tonight Show.” With Fallon, it was a high-energy roller coaster all the time. The challenge for the show seemed to be: how many TikTok videos and YouTube shorts can we milk out of this?

The interview lasted for nearly the entire broadcast, with Fallon and Swift at one point moving away from the traditional couch and desk set-up and sitting down at a roundtable with podcast microphones in front of them. Fallon would play a song from Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, the audience would sing, and the two would talk about the song’s creation. Might this be the first podcast-style, TV-broadcast sing-along with obviously planned pivot to vertical video in late night history?

Two nights later, Swift was back on NBC, talking with Seth Meyers on Late Night. There, it was a much more laid-back and quiet affair, in keeping with the show’s typically minimalist demeanor. Swift even came with two loaves of bread for Meyers as a gift. “I learned to bake bread from a wonderful woman named Tine,” Swift said. “And I have now made it everyone’s problem.”

Meyers, for his part, said he thought the bread was great. The problem? The puns written on the wrapping, such as “Are you bready for this?” “This,” he said, “is an intervention on behalf of your friends and family.”

Finally, we conclude with John Oliver, who dedicated his October 12 broadcast to the conservative opinion journalist Bari Weiss, who was recently named the editor-in-chief of CBS News. Oliver gives the full overview of Weiss’s career, covering her controversial departure from the New York Times, to her founding the news and opinion outlet, The Free Press, which, despite being funded by “reactionary” billionaires and spouting conservative fear-mongering stories about topics like “DEI,” was described by Weiss as having “punk energy.”

“It is pretty hard to claim you’ve got punk energy when you essentially spout conservative talking points while dressed like the front desk manager at a Courtyard Marriott,” Oliver observed. “I, for one, do not trust the punk bona fides of anyone wearing an Ann Taylor collarless silk blouse.”

For Oliver, the point was not to delegitimize opinion journalism, but to question the wisdom of handing off one of the country’s most influential and trusted news organizations to someone with a history of selective, factually questionable reporting.

“I wouldn’t want anyone who led a pure opinion outlet, not even one that I happened to agree with, to suddenly be running CBS News,” Oliver said. “But it is especially alarming to have someone doing it who has spent years putting out work that, in my opinion, is at best irresponsible and at worst deeply misleading.”

Will DiGravio is a Brooklyn-based critic, researcher, and late night comedy columnist, who first contributed to Paste in 2022. He is an assistant editor at Cineaste, a GALECA member, and since 2019 has hosted The Video Essay Podcast. You can follow and/or unfollow him on Twitter and learn more about him via his website.

Late Night Last Week: Josh Johnson Proves He is No One-Hit Wonder, Kimmel Keeps Talking Free Speech, and More