While Seth Meyers’ former Weekend Update home is getting its own prime time spin-off in August, the former SNL anchor has been doing a long-form Update for a few years now in his Late Night With Seth Meyers “Closer Look” segment. Essentially letting Meyers go after a newsworthy satirical target as long as he likes, tonight’s “Closer Look” spent a solid 14 minutes laying out what Meyers called the “surreal and chaotic development that has felt like something out of a dictatorship” that was Donald Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey on Tuesday.
You know, James Comey. The guy who Trump praised for releasing damaging intelligence about Hillary Clinton right before Election Day, but who lost favor in the capricious Trump’s eyes when he headed up the pesky investigation into Russian interference in said election, including increasingly evident collusion between Trump’s campaign and a foreign power. Citing Trump’s infamous kiss-blowing greeting to Comey upon taking office early this year as “The Fredo,” Meyers said, “we assumed there was one thing Trump would not do.” And then he elucidated, at length, not only the thing that Trump did, indeed do, but also the breathless rush of the TV press to cover the fallout. (Literally in the case of CNN’s poor Jeff Zeleny, shown in a clip panting and sweaty after sprinting to deliver the Comey news.)
Taking viewers through the entirety of this most recent Trump clusterfuck, Meyers, as he’s done from the start with Trump, delivered his jokes while maintaining unblinking eye contact with viewers to communicate how completely unprecedented and perilous this whole situation continues to be for the country. He even kept up the bit when throwing to a clip of Anderson Cooper’s inability to do the same when coping with tennis ball machine filled with lies and Trump spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway.