It’s hard to make jokes about the news when the news is a nonstop deluge of raw informational sewage. What can you possibly make with that? Puns? Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers decided they weren’t going to even try to write goofs for their monologues last night, instead offering heartfelt and, in Meyers’s case, scathing reactions to this weekend’s white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the violence that it spawned, and President Trump’s delayed rebuke of the racists and neo-Nazis who took part. “It’s important for everyone, especially white people, in this country to speak out against this,†a choked-up Fallon said on The Tonight Show. “Ignoring it is just as bad as supporting it.†He also honored Heather Heyer, the woman killed by a white supremacist who drove through a crowd of protesters at the rally; 19 others were injured. “We can’t do this,†concluded Fallon. “We can’t go backward.â€
Seth Meyers was somewhat less solemn, but significantly more angry, on Late Night last night, pointing out that POTUS’s slow move to condemn white supremacy came after making a political name for himself by suggesting former president Barack Obama was born in Kenya, calling Mexicans rapists, hiring Steve Bannon, and so on and so forth ad nauseam. “You can stand for a nation or you can stand for a hateful movement. You cannot do both,†Meyers concluded. “And if you don’t make the right choice, I am confident that the American voter will.â€