Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah talked poison rhetoric and black Trump on The Late Show

In a meeting of late night political comedy hosts, Stephen Colbert had Daily Show anchor Trevor Noah to The Late Show last night, where the two veterans of the satirical trenches swapped Trump notes, and addressed the day’s mass shooting in Alexandria, Virginia. Doing comedy in the face of a mass shooting is, sadly, something both Colbert and Noah have become depressingly adept at, and the two took time to talk about their hopes that the bi-partisan solidarity expressed by Republican and Democratic leaders in the wake of the shooting of GOP Congressman Steve Scalise and several others would, this time, lead to some much needed mutual mellowing with regard to the poison rhetoric that’s become de rigeur in Washington and around the nation. Citing the fact that recent Daily Show guest, Democratic Senator Al Franken shared that he has long been friends with embattled Republican Attorney General Jeff Sessions despite their many political differences, Noah said that common humanity in the face of disagreements is the only way forward for us all. “Some people look at politicians like wrestling,” suggested Noah, “where those fans don’t realize that those people get along.”

Still, despite the fact that the charity Republicans versus Democrats baseball game whose practice was disrupted by the attack (from one of those lone gunmen we’re all so fucking sick of) will go on on Thursday as planned, Noah and Colbert have jobs to do, sorting through the besieged foundations of American democracy. Colbert drew on Noah’s heritage to ask if, in his native South Africa, there’s ever been a politician who, as Colbert put it delicately of Trump, “breaks a lot of norms.” Noah said that we need look no further than current South African President Jacob Zuma who, like a lot of the African dictators that also leapt to Noah’s mind, shares many traits with the American leader, pigmentation notwithstanding. (Colbert deferred when Noah made a “person of color” joke, in reference to Trump’s oft-mocked tangerine shading.) Pretending to run down a list of supposed differences—self-love, a belief that only he can fix any problem, referring to himself in the third person, a series of family corruption/nepotism scandals, pals with Vladimir Putin—Noah conceded that, well, at least Trump was the first to really be at home on Twitter, a fact behind the Daily Show’s latest bit of Trump-baiting, the Trump Twitter library. (Located just around the corner from New York’s Trump Tower, it will be organized by hashtag, with the largest exhibit for now consisting, inevitably, of #sad.)