Late Night Last Week: Bill Burr and Jon Stewart Rip LA Wildfire Trolls

Every week, Late Night Last Week highlights some of the best late night TV from the previous week. This week, Bill Burr talks about the devastating L.A. fires, Jon Stewart targets the outrageous Republican response to the fires, and NBC hosts a couple of great stand-up sets.
Los Angeles continues to deal with the effects of the devastating wildfires, but that has not stopped some people from weighing in with a host of horrible takes and conspiracies. On late night last week, Bill Burr and Jon Stewart would not stand for it.
On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Burr, who nearly lost his home, came out swinging in the guest’s chair. He directed his ire towards the armchair firefighters online. “This was definitely mismanaged,” Burr said, mocking the keyboard warriors. “Mismanaged? Like some fucking idiot on the internet knows how to manage the worst fire in LA, sitting there in his underwear.”
Burr then turned his attention to the mainstream media’s coverage of the fires. “All the chatter out there is about bands of illegal immigrants and homeless people lighting fires. They’re lighting fires every day! They’re cold!” he said. “But CNN and Fox News are not gonna bring up the insurance companies that are just gonna keep everybody’s premiums and still give themselves a bonus.” “Free Luigi!” he added.
This led to Jimmy Kimmel asking his guest how he would be in a fire. Burr admitted that he does well in high-pressure incidents, but not so well in the day-to-day. When the toaster doesn’t work? That’s when he loses it and all his suppressed emotions come out: “They’re like, Dad, it’s toast, what is the big deal? It’s like, well, I would tell you what the big deal was but it’s too sad, so we’ll just keep it on the toast.”
Meanwhile, over on The Daily Show, Monday host Jon Stewart did what he does so well: expose hypocrisy. Stewart began the broadcast with the fires, highlighting the heroic work of firefighters (many of whom are incarcerated) and the devastation. But he soon turned to elected leaders on the right in Washington, who are now saying that any aid to California must come with conditions.
“I can do The Daily Show thing. I can run down all the congresspeople and senators on the right calling for conditions on disaster aid that absolutely had the opposite view when it was their state on the line,” Stewart said. “I could do it, but it doesn’t even matter. I’m not even going to do it. Red states are always the tragic victims of circumstance outside of their control and Democrats always vote for their aid. Whereas blue state disasters are a function of their flawed morality and policy. And if we help blue state survivors, well what message will that send? What lesson will they learn?”
A smart man in awful times. Watch his full monologue below.
The NBC late night programming played host to a pair of strong stand-up sets last week. On Monday, Dusty Slay came out on The Tonight Show to capture a feeling to which many will relate. “You ever check into a hotel and the pool’s closed?” he asked. “And you weren’t planning on getting in, but you still feel a little ripped off?”
He then pivoted to one of the great unknown mysteries of our time: when the x-ray machine goes off at the airport, “and then the TSA guy comes over, he looks, he goes, ahh, you’re good.” Fine. “But,” Dusty asked, “I’m like, yeah, but what did it see though?”
On Late Night with Seth Meyers, Aaron Chen came on to discuss moving to New York from Australia. “I know I look different to how I sound. You guys don’t have this combo over here. This is a rare combo,” Chen said. “I feel like a woke remake of Crocodile Dundee.”
Chen then recounted asking his therapist whether he had autism. “She gave quite a vague response. She said, would it help you to know? Which sounds like a soft yes,” Chen said. “So I said to her, did it help Harry to know that he was a wizard?”
Last week Meyers also welcomed to his program Aidy Bryant, the Saturday Night Live alumnus now making her Broadway debut in Simon Rich’s All In: Comedy About Love. Bryant and Meyers discussed all things Broadway, including his rushing up to her at a show once to borrow $20, and her first memories of visiting New York City as a child from Arizona.
Bryant remembered going to see The Lion King with her grandmother and cousins, only to have one of them begin vomiting in the middle of the performance. She looked away: “My first lesson immediately was: family doesn’t matter, show business does.”
Alright, a final word on politics. Donald Trump was just sworn in for his second term. Some people saw this coming. Allan Lichtman did not. If that name means nothing to you, perhaps you know him best as the dude who had correctly predicted every presidential election since 1984 expect for 2000 but he still says he’s not wrong about that one because Al Gore may have, in fact, won, and he’s got those “13 keys” that he says are always right and will indicate whether the incumbent president’s party will win. Ring a bell?
Anyway, last year, he predicted that Kamala Harris would be elected the 47th president, touting his view on virtually every media outlet, including in an interview with Daily Show correspondent Grace Kuhlenschmidt. Well, Kuhlenschmidt was not happy with Lichtman, and so she sat down with him again to make sure he received his comeuppance.
“Alan, I seriously trusted you,” she says, seated before the scholar, who tries to interject. “No, no. It’s not your time to talk yet. I seriously trusted you. And I thought what you told me was the truth.” Watch the full, hilarious exchange below.
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.