Why Late Night Shows Won’t Roast Joe Biden

In late March, 5,000 Democratic luminaries packed into a star-studded Radio City Music Hall fundraiser featuring President Joe Biden and former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. From the fat cat attendees to the guests of honor, the sold-out spectacle was rife with comedic opportunity. But there was little skewering to be found on late night television that evening or afterwards.

One reason: The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert, one of the most famous comedians in the world and a self-styled hero of the ongoing resistance against former President Donald Trump, served as the event’s moderator.

Colbert’s ultra-friendly exchanges with Biden, Obama and Clinton as emcee of the largest Democratic fundraiser ever — it raised a whopping $26 million for Biden’s reelection effort — were emblematic of a new era in late night comedy. It’s more proudly partisan. More one-sided. More cautious in its targets. And it’s generally soft on Biden.

By any metric, Biden is a rich vein of material for late night or sketch comics. He arrived in the White House with a hard-earned reputation as a gaffe machine. The oldest president ever, he was first elected to the Senate during the era of eight-track tapes and rotary telephones. Since his ascendancy to the White House, he has fairly consistently stumbled over his own words, mixed up the names of world leaders and countries and even physically stumbled on stage himself, tripping and falling at a U.S. Air Force graduation. His speaking style can be jarring: He can sound something like an old-timey preacher, delivering surprising anecdotes while vacillating between a yell and a whisper.

For all his ripeness as a comic target, though, Biden has largely escaped the kind of pillorying that some of his predecessors got. Despite Biden’s own trouble navigating stairs, there’s nothing on television like Chevy Chase imitating President Gerald Ford’s stumbles, a running gag that turned Ford into a national punchline. When Clinton’s extramarital affair with intern Monica Lewinsky broke, it consumed late night (and much of American popular culture) for weeks, with Jay Leno joking, “Now we know why Clinton’s eyes always seem so puffy and red. Mace.” At the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, Colbert himself mocked George W. Bush right to his face using the fake conservative persona he adopted while host of The Colbert Report.

“Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating,” he said. “But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Nearly 20 years later at the same event, White House Correspondents’ Dinner host Colin Jost said about the president, “I would like to point out that it is after 10:00 p.m. Sleepy Joe is still awake, while Donald Trump has spent the past week falling asleep in court every morning.” And he thanked Biden for his “decency.”

Late night and sketch comedy have always been self-admitted, proudly liberal bastions, saving their sharpest knives for Republican politicians who — in many comedy writers’ minds — are often much more deserving of a barb. But the Donald Trump era — in which liberal media consumers salivated over takedowns of the president — has prompted a sea change in comedy that has carried over to Biden’s presidency, with late night hosts appearing to view themselves as bulwarks against Trump, careful not to let their humor be perceived as advancing his interests in any way.

“I think [late night hosts] see themselves much more as defenders of democracy than they did in the past, when you would think of satire as more like holding power accountable,” says Matt Fotis, the author of Satire & The State: Sketch Comedy and the Presidency and an associate professor of theatre at Albright College.

As these hosts approached the task of poking fun at Trump, they moved from being comic mercenaries to understanding themselves as part of a media apparatus that had to stand up to the dangers of Trump. And as he’s loomed over the Biden era, they’ve pulled their punches on the new president, styling themselves as sentinels of the Trump resistance rather than stiletto-wielding stand-ups for whom anyone was fair game.

President Biden does still come in for his fair share of one liners; one host or another jabs him on something every few weeks. Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon recently spoofed the elderly president for joining TikTok, donning a white wig and saying (as Biden), “my Roman Empire was the Roman Empire. Because I was there.”

“Advisers have to understand Biden’s voice,” said Colbert after Biden’s feisty State of the Union. “Because it STARTS UP HERE, and then (Colbert dramatically lowers his voice) it comes down here.”

Jimmy Kimmel said on his eponymous show that “Biden’s physical took about three hours, one hour of examination, two for him to get his pants back on.”

But even when the knives are out for the president, they’re often drawn in the context of comparing him to something far worse, as if any joke about him requires a Trump counterpoint.

“It was kind of a tense night, because it feels like this might be the last time we get a State of the Union,” Colbert continued the night of the State of the Union. “Depending on what happens in November, next year might just be a Kid Rock concert and an immigrant catapult.”

About the 81-year-old president’s health, Kimmel said, “People act like the results of that physical are going to somehow influence who we vote for. I don’t care if he comes out of that office in an iron lung; I would be fully okay with a Weekend at Bernie’s-type White House situation if it means no Trump.”

Trump, on the other hand, is a flashing target for late night hosts and writers, the result of his narcissism and a set of singular traits and peccadilloes that stretch far beyond those of his recent predecessors.

His ascendancy to the White House — and the widespread fears stoked by his defiance of the rule of law — also led late night hosts to conclude they were unable to treat him like any other president.

One moment on late night before the 2016 election even occurred made clear just how quickly the ground was shifting under comedians’ feet — and how much they’d have to adapt to the age of Trump. In September 2016, Fallon famously tousled Trump’s hair during the then-candidate’s appearance on his program.

It was the sort of gesture that, up until that point, was understood to be in bounds (if not particularly funny) for the comedian-politician relationship. But the light-hearted interaction generated a furious response from viewers, and Fallon has expressed regrets about the incident. Many of Fallon’s viewers were incensed that he was mainstreaming a man who gleefully defied the norms of American politics and demonized immigrants by treating him like a goofy office holder or a garden-variety celebrity. The reaction laid bare the new rules of late night comedy — that hosts couldn’t think of Trump as just any politician anymore, nor could they think of themselves as simple comics. Their viewers demanded something different: sharper, more directed attacks.

According to Stephen Farnsworth, the director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington and co-author of Late Night with Trump: Political Humor and the American Presidency, there was another reason for the shift in attitude: ratings.

“Fallon’s congenial treatment of Trump really hurt his audience share,” he says. Fallon routinely beat Colbert in the ratings through September 2016, but in the late night season that ran from September 2016 to May 2017 — the period immediately following the tousled hair incident — Colbert passed Fallon, giving him and CBS the first full season late night ratings victory over NBC in two decades. Colbert found success hammering Trump in the cold open of his show almost every evening, leaning into his political background.

The Late Show declined to comment for this article.

One late night host who sat out the Trump era was Jon Stewart, who stepped down from the host chair in 2015 and focused on advocating for 9/11 first responders as a private citizen before returning to host a more policy-focused Apple TV show in 2021. When he returned to The Daily Show in February, his first monologue took aim at both Biden and Trump.

He quickly discovered how the game had changed.

Speaking soon after Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report about Biden and the president’s ensuing press conference, Stewart said, “Joe Biden had a big press conference to dispel the notion that he may have lost a step, and politically speaking he lost three or four steps.”

He made sure to note a difference between Biden and Trump, arguing, “Biden’s lost a step, but Trump regularly says things at rallies that would warrant a wellness check.”

But his monologue, sharp and pointed at times toward Biden, revealed some distinct philosophical disagreements with the Democratic Party and the president. Over 20 uninterrupted minutes in which he essentially discussed only Biden and Trump, Stewart built out a clear point of view on the race and the state of American politics. His essential argument: Rather than treat Biden with kid gloves for fear of a second Trump presidency, if you’re really afraid of what would come under Trump 2.0, then you should be holding Biden’s feet to the fire.

“Joe Biden isn’t Donald Trump,” Stewart said. “But the stakes of this election don’t make Donald Trump’s opponent less subject to scrutiny. It actually makes him more subject to scrutiny. If the barbarians are at the gate, you want Conan [the Barbarian] standing on the ramparts.”

In the Trump era, though, most late night hosts made it clear that they were explicitly against the actions and character of the president. Equivocation of any sort was not permissible. At least some of the audience adapted, reflexively expecting their hosts to lay off Biden once he ousted Trump. With the prospect of a Trump return to office, viewers were furious at Stewart.

Chris D. Jackson, who served as a local Democratic Party chair in Tennessee, responded on X, “Wow. So you basically say because Biden is old, he is basically as bad as Trump. Why thr [sic] F do we never learn as a country? Sorry, but I won’t be watching you either.”

Keith Olbermann — who has feuded with Stewart for years — weighed in, “Well after nine years away, there's nothing else to say to the bothsidesist fraud Jon Stewart bashing Biden, except: Please make it another nine years.”

Mary Trump, the former president’s niece and a leading critic, piled on, writing on X, “Not only is Stewart’s ‘both sides are the same’ rhetoric not funny, it’s a potential disaster for democracy.”

It was a bracing reminder of a shift in the way that late night’s viewers understood the format’s purpose — they’d like their political enemies punished and their friends treated with a lighter touch. Largely liberal late night audiences don’t want to hear about Biden’s stumbles — in fact, much of the audience finds that criticism somewhat offensive. They want to hear about Trump’s foibles instead. The programming largely reflects that.

“I would have said that late night comics were not scared of alienating their audience by going after Biden. But there was such pushback on Jon Stewart,” Fotis said. “I’m sure that’s partly in [writers’] minds, they don’t want to get yelled at.”

The Daily Show’s head writer, Dan Amira, says the show intends to buck that trend and that its animating principles actually haven’t changed much since he joined in 2014. Stewart’s return also has viewers flocking back to the show — the Monday shows that he’s hosted have averaged just under 880,000 viewers, more than 2.5 times the show’s 2023 average. Even if some people are angry with him, they’re still back to watching.

“We’ve approached Biden the same way we approach anyone,” Amira says. “If you’re in power, or trying to get into power, you should expect some scrutiny from late night shows. That’s what political comedy is about.”

The ethos of Stewart’s and Amira’s arguments may look about the same as they did a decade ago. But as The Daily Show takes the approach of highlighting political hypocrisy above all else, the world around the program is unrecognizable. The very nature of political comedy has been forced to change because the rise in fear and division is suddenly no laughing matter.

It’s a change in attitude that has huge implications for all art forms that seek to blend politics and culture. If some topics are verboten, and some political figures are beyond reproach, then we’re setting ourselves up for a culture of increasingly niche products serving niche audiences. Right-wing comic Greg Gutfeld has found ratings success on Fox News counterprogramming with conservative comedy (if you can call it that) because he’s exploited that hole in the market. The future of political comedy looks a lot more like that: Hacky, partisan bomb-throwing with a half-joke or two thrown in for good measure. It’s Gutfeld across the board.