Stephen Colbert made the most of having an audience-free studio last night, his jokes amusingly floating on the titters of a few dozen staffers, and he wasn’t the only one. To help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, a number of late night shows are either banning audiences or, like Seth Meyers, finding alternate ways to reach them. Trevor Noah, meanwhile, honored his absent audience with a song.
And Jimmy Kimmel, well, he spent his evening hosting Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? so shadow Republican and billionaire boot-kisser Pete Buttigieg could comfort a terrified nation with jokes about pretzels delivered to a near-empty studio filled only with his sycophants. We reported earlier this week that Buttigieg, the 38-year old former Indiana mayor and presidential candidate, would serve as a guest host on the program, a deeply stupid and unnecessary turn of events that grew even more surreal once we found out we’re in the middle of an honest-to-god pandemic. As the response to this tweet from comedian Joel Kim Booster makes clear, simply stringing these words together is enough to demonstrate their brain-melting absurdity.
Buttigieg, who could be doing literally anything else, does his best Obama voice while delivering cringy jokes about Trump, the Iowa caucus app, and Sarah Palin’s cursed appearance on The Masked Singer. “That’s gonna be me in three months, isn’t it?” he asks, turning all of us into this GIF. He also, being a guy who thought he was capable of leading a completely fucked country, delivers some of the bold, galvanizing messaging that defined his campaign: “The only way we’re going to get through this crisis is with unity,” he declares. “So who’s with me?” Whoa. Unity? Slow down, chief. “This virus is no match for the American people,” he adds, another statement that sounds nice and means absolutely nothing.