US President Donald Trump has broken yet another record. A study has found (although exactly who is wasting their money funding this study and their time doing it is unclear) that the former star of “The Apprentice” has been the butt of more jokes on late-night talk shows in the first 100 days of his Presidency than any other President in recent memory did in their whole first year in office. It’s no easy feat – there were more jokes to make about Trump in 100 days than there were to make about George W. Bush in 365.
You see, at the beginning of US talk shows, before the musical guest performs or some other celebrity comes on to have a little chat with Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon or Conan O’Brien or Seth Meyers or whoever in front of a live audience who have been instructed to laugh at all the jokes and cheer for everything that comes out of their mouths, the hosts do a monologue that a team of writers have spent all week putting together.
“The Chris Rock Show” had some really great opening monologues, but we’re not talking about “The Chris Rock Show,” since that went off the air years ago. Anyway, the jokes in these monologues lampoon current events, and they have to be written quickly by a scrambling writers’ room, so they’ll always go for the easiest targets to lampoon, and every week since he was sworn into the White House, Trump has been that easy target.
Total joke count: 1,060
The total tally of jokes made at Trump’s expense during late-night talk show hosts’ monologues in the last 100 days in 1,060. Over a thousand jokes were making mocking the President. That’s more than ten jokes per day! The study was conducted by George Mason University’s Centre for Media and Public Affairs.
Trump’s total for 100 days is even more than Barack Obama’s total for a year. In 2009, 936 jokes were made about Obama in late-night televised monologues. Bafflingly, this figure is almost four hundred more than that of George W. Bush, whose total in 2001 was 546. To be fair, while Bush is a more ridiculous President than Obama, a certain thing happened in 2001 where at a particular point people weren’t really in the mood for humour, remember?
The last four months of 2001 were a tumultuous time in America. In 1993, 440 jokes were made about Bill Clinton. That makes about 120.5 for 100 days, which is just a little over a tenth of Trump’s number.
The Director of the CMPA, Dr. Robert Lichter, said that Trump is “head and shoulders” above the other Presidents as the one late-night TV show hosts “love to hate” the most.
The hosts were each given their own numbers. Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah made the most jokes, which makes sense since they come from backgrounds in political humour. Colbert’s joke count is 337, Noah’s is 315, Fallon’s is 231, and Kimmel’s is just 177. The CMPA’s study will be ongoing as they continue to count the Trump jokes in every late-night monologue from now until 2020.