Late-night comics have long been relentless in skewering Donald Trump. Now it’s Joe Biden’s turn

NEW YORK (AP) — Stephen Colbert took a slug from his drink glass before his first monologue after President Joe Biden’s disastrous performance during his debate with Donald Trump. This was going to be hard.

But then the CBS “Late Show” host dove right into jokes that were impossible for any political satirist to resist.

“I think that Biden debates as well as Abraham Lincoln — if you dug him up right now,” Colbert said this week.

He had company. Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon have all found fodder in Biden’s stumbling, slack-jawed performance and in the Democrats’ internal debate over whether the president should drop his campaign for a second term.

Late-night comics have skewered Biden’s Republican opponent, Donald Trump, for years. Some have made no secret that their feelings were not just professional: Colbert moderated a panel discussion between Biden and former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton at a Manhattan fundraiser in March, and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel held court at a Biden Hollywood event last month.

Yet to think they would have ignored Biden’s troubles was naive, says Robert Thompson, a scholar of TV and its history.

“The idea that late-night comedy has been another mouthpiece for the Democratic party is simply not true, because comedy cannot afford to do that,” said Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. “The job is that you’ve got to make fun of the people in power.”

A week of pointed comedy

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