Late-night comedy rushes into the Trump era

By David Bauder

AP Television Writer

NEW YORK

HBO’s ads promoting John Oliver on “Last Week Tonight” depict him cowering behind a desk, with the tag line, “Scary times call for a scared man.”

Be not afraid. Between Oliver’s return Sunday from a three-month hiatus and Donald Trump impersonator Alec Baldwin’s stint hosting “Saturday Night Live,” this is shaping up to be a big weekend in what has been a promising start to the Trump era in late-night comedy.

Melissa McCarthy’s impersonation of White House press secretary Sean Spicer exploded on social media last weekend. Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah are nightly newscasters of the absurd, Samantha Bee is continuing her biting work and Stephen Colbert’s opinionated topicality has rejuvenated his CBS show in competition with NBC’s Jimmy Fallon.

“We have to live in [Trump’s] world now,” said Steve Bodow, executive producer of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. “We used to be able to observe him, but now we have to live in his world. He’s taken the country hostage, in a way.”

The mountain of material has been daunting. Bodow’s fellow executive producer, Jen Flanz, likens the pace to cramming for a different test every day. Bee seemed breathless recently telling viewers, “Believe me, we are not done,” and beseeching them to stick with her through a commercial break after comparing confusion surrounding Trump’s immigration order to the “healthcare.gov of Islamophobia.”

Once an occasional feature, Meyers’ “A Closer Look” segment is like a newspaper opened every day at the top of his show. There’s so much to work with that he said he toggles between “multiple Constitutional crises” and “mundane, every day weirdness,” such as confusing comments Trump made about historical figure Frederick Douglass.

“The Daily Show’s” Noah did a “Profile in Tremendousness” about Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, mocking the jurist’s story about crying when he first learned of the death of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as “the whitest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Daily Show” correspondent Hasan Minhaj also has emerged as an important voice, a Muslim comedian at a time many Muslims feel under attack.

Into this maelstrom steps Oliver. He’s made it a point in past years to say he wanted to avoid the day-to-day tumult of politics, believing it best suited to those with a nightly platform while he concentrates on his investigative comedy. But some things are hard to resist, and his show about Trump’s family name change from “Drumpf” was one of last season’s highlights.

How much will Trump dominate his upcoming round of shows?

“We’ll work it out,” he said. “I could lie to your face again. I don’t know. We’re very anxious to not make it all Trump all of the time, both for the level of interest and on a level of what the human soul can sustain.”

Colbert, whose show had been floundering so much that early last year there were whispers it wouldn’t last, sharpened his focus during the campaign to become pointedly topical.

Last week, Colbert also beat NBC’s “Tonight” show host Jimmy Fallon in the ratings for the first time since the week Colbert took over for David Letterman on the “Late Show” in September 2015.

Colbert walks a careful line, since CBS is dominant in the parts of the country where Trump has his strongest base, but he’s been careful to mock Trump, and not necessarily the people who supported him.

Fallon, who’s been the late-night comedy king from the instant he took over from Jay Leno in 2014, is the one comic clearly struggling in the new era.

It’s a blistering pace to keep up with. As Meyers noted, “two weeks into the Trump presidency, and already it feels like two years.”