Late Night Last Week: Jon Stewart Hates CNN’s Book-Plugging, Shaq Gives Fallon’s Audience Shoes, and More
Every week, Late Night Last Week highlights some of the best late night TV from the previous week. In this week’s late night TV recap, Jon Stewart tackles the Biden book being pushed by CNN, Shaq gives away some shoes, Lisa Gilroy hosts After Midnight, and John Mulaney tells an Uber joke.
For decades now, few institutions have been more at the center of Jon Stewart’s comedic crosshairs than the 24-hour cable news channel. Stewart’s logic has always been that these networks, whether it be Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN, are only needed in their current form around big events like 9/11, not on the average day where they must fill their airwaves with “partisan hackery,” as he said during his famous appearance on CNN’s Crossfire.
But in his monologue last Monday, Stewart touched on another power of that news machine: its ability to sell books. If you are reading this, you have probably encountered an ad, article, or clip discussing the recent book co-authored by CNN’s Jake Tapper on the mental and physical decline of Joe Biden while in office. “Like most people in America, I am most looking forward to reading a book,” Stewart said. “But when? WHEEENNNNNN?!”
Cue montage of book plugs by Tapper, ending with: “You will not believe what we found out.” The irony of future news being plugged on a 24-hour news channel was like the proverbial barreled fish for Stewart. “Don’t news people,” Stewart slowly began to ask, “have to tell you what they know when they find it out?”
“Isn’t that the difference between news and a secret?” he added.
You may also know that just before the book was actually released last week, the former president went public with the news that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Stewart played a montage of hosts and journalists reacting to the news, all ending with a plug or at least noting the forthcoming book. “It’s just fun to watch them not only continue to push the book in light of this difficult news, but to actually frame this difficult news as perhaps even more of a reason to buy this book,” he said.
But for Stewart, the real irony of the situation came from the fact that this “bombshell” of a book is not, in fact, anything of the sort. While many of the inner details of Biden’s decline may be new, the public, as Stewart pointed out, could not only see this with our own two eyes, but poll after poll showed that he should not have sought a second term. The public could see what much of the media did not, and what many Democrats tried to hide.
“Most of the public knew that it was a bad idea for Biden to run. We knew it. And that’s what is so hilarious about politicians,” Stewart said, “the cover-up doesn’t work when everyone knows you’re lying.”
“And the media,” he added, “tasked with covering them, have somehow ended up inside the bubble with them.”
In keeping with our discussion of the good ol’ USA, few things are more American than giving away free stuff to a live television studio audience, or, as it could be called, an advertisement delivered in the form of a gift. Few things are more contrived than the studio giveaway—you think that crap got under the seats all on its own?
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