As much as late night hosts seem to hate President Trump, it’s a fair question to wonder what they would talk about if he wasn’t in office, or didn’t win re-election.
A new study shows that 97% of the jokes Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon told about the presidential candidates in the month of September targeted Trump. To further break down the numbers, that comes to 455 jokes about Trump during the month, and 14 that had Biden in the crosshairs of a punchline. The study was conducted by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, who said on top of all the Trump jokes, they did not include in the final tally the 64 jokes made about Trump’s family or administration.
Robert Lichter, a communications professor at George Mason is literally an expert on this topic. He’s been studying humor and politics for 28 years. “When Trump’s onstage, everyone else is blacked out,” he said.
The left-leaning hosts and joke writers unsurprisingly target Republicans more than Democrats, the study revealed, and since Lichter has been breaking down the numbers, he said this year is by far the biggest disparity between the jokes targeting the two candidates. The closest was in 2016, when Trump was the punchline on 78% of the jokes compared to the 22% of the time Hillary Clinton provided the fodder.
Either Joe Biden is incredibly boring, or Fallon, Colbert and their writers are secretly obsessed with Trump. But here’s something that isn’t funny for the late-night crews. They will have to come up with some new material if Biden wins the election.
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