Stephen Colbert
On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert started by reminding everyone what the day represented for Americans. “Today was also tax day or as Jeff Bezos calls it, no it’s not,” he joked.
The midterms are seven months away and “culture wars are raging” especially in Florida, which he referred to as “America’s mullet”.
Colbert said it was a state obsessed with “withholding knowledge from children” and ensuring they don’t feel any personal responsibility for historic wrongs. “It’s really hard to tell the story of America without talking about historic wrongs,” he noted.
The state rejected 41% of new math textbooks for containing what they claim to be Critical Race Theory language or “at least they think it’s 41%, for some reason they suck at math”.
There is a refusal to provide any examples but the process is being described as transparent. “I guess they also banned dictionaries because that’s not what transparent means,” he said.
Next up was Tucker Carlson and Colbert said that he was “hesitant to talk about Tucker because he does or says things that are kind of stupid for attention but this one is so stupid that it got my attention”.
His new documentary is about the “de-broing of America” and so the trailer featured a montage of sweaty muscular shirtless men. “Coming from a Fox News anchor, that is a refreshing and positive display of homoeroticism,” he said.
The most-ridiculed section has a man using a tanning device for his testicles. “Is that man scanning his penis at the self-checkout?” he asked.
Colbert found it surprising that Carlson was into the idea of testicle tanning as “the last time I checked, he is the whitest dick ever”.
Trevor Noah
The logic around Florida’s CRT math textbook ban just doesn't hold up pic.twitter.com/NBd2NHODaJ
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) April 19, 2022
On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah also spoke about Florida’s strange textbook crisis. “If they were trying to sneak CRT into schools, why would they lead with math?” he asked. “Math textbooks would be the worst place to do it because who remembers anything they learned in math, huh? Do you remember how to use a hypotenuse?”
He continued: “Even Liam Neeson, his particular set of skills did not include a hypotenuse.”
But Noah also realised that perhaps it could be a good place for critical race theory. “I actually wish there was CRT in math textbooks because then we would have solved racism by now just by cheating and going to the back of the book with all the answers in it,” he joked.
Seth Meyers
On Late Night with Seth Meyers, he also spoke about Carlson’s unhinged new doc about testosterone. In an interview with a testicle tanning expert, Carlson said that about half of his viewers would be shocked by the idea.
But Meyers countered and said if you watched a Carlson-fronted show then “you might be down to clown with just about anything”.
In the same show, Carlson’s object of affection Kid Rock was less sure about the idea. Meyers called it an idea “so insane even Kid Rock couldn’t wrap his head around it”.
He continued: “Is it already time to resort to tanning your balls? Nothing is crazier than a conservative’s second idea. I don’t trust vaccines but I’ll eat some horse paste. Are there ever solutions somewhere between plan ‘a’ and the craziest shit you’ve ever heard?”
Meyers said of Carlson and Trump, who recently went on another rant against windmills, that: “These are the people leading the conservative movement in the Republican party”.
This week has also revealed that Utah senator Mike Lee and Donald Trump Jr were in text contact with the White House on ways to overturn the election results. Meyers joked that Don Jr’s texts made him “sound like the bad guy in a Jean Claude Van Damme movie”.
