A Triumph of Child Acting Won Late Night This Week

Let’s start “This Week in Late Night” with a gripe. All the shows had material on the GOP pretending Barack Obama offended Middle America when he came for the Cheesecake Factory. That’s reasonable. It was a stupid and omnipresent story, so of course there’d be monologue jokes about it. And of course jokes were made about the absurdly long menu at the aforementioned Cheesecake Factory; that is a gimme. But what ground my gears was that most of the specific dishes mentioned in these jokes were from the appetizers. The writers looked at the first twoish pages of the PDF menu and called it a day. They don’t know ball! Hats off to The Daily Show for name-dropping a specific insane cheesecake varietal. That’s putting in the work.

Now a high note to end the intro on, again from The Daily Show: Jon Stewart had a fascinatingly contentious interview with Matthew Cole, the guy who wrote the book about Jared Kushner and his Saudi and Emirati princes. It started with Cole reading the denial Kushner’s lawyer sent of everything Cole says in his book. It set the tone of “grandstanding-yet-particular intelligence wonk” versus “cynical average news consumer” that carried over the following 26 minutes. They could not agree on a shared reality, but in a way that was very compelling television. And Stewart got one joke in that made me laugh like a barking seal. When Cole introduced the Israel-Palestine conflict as the central issue of Middle East policy, Stewart said, “Is that still going on? I didn’t finish the book.” Here’s what else got a guffaw out of me this week.

5. 
Julian McCullough Opens for The Tonight Show

Julian McCullough has been opening for Nate Bargatze for a good long minute. They’re old pals and started comedy at the same time. McCullough had some solid material about the places they’ve toured, but the best part of his set was when he reckoned with the difference in career trajectory they’ve had over the same span of time. McCullough joked that it must be really cool for Bargatze that his dad is proud of him, but he’s not seeing the bigger picture. McCullough hasn’t made a movie so mid that there have been multiple think pieces about it.

4. 
Tracy Letts Tells It Like It Is

Tracy Letts is a great interview. This is just a fact (and the backbone of two episodes of Blank Check). He’s candid, he’s got jokes, and he’s not afraid to shit on his own work — even if that work is August: Osage County. The best part of his time with Jordan Klepper on The Daily Show was when he disputed the mythic claim that Sylvester Stallone wrote Rocky in three days. It’s a really funny position to take while on the press tour for your role in I Play Rocky.

3. 
Gabourey Sidibe Calls Jimmy Kimmel a Pussy

Has Gabourey Sidibe guest-hosted for Jimmy Kimmel? Because I think she’d be great at it. Sidibe gabbed gorgeously with Kimmel about American Horror Story, Halloween costumes, and raising mixed-gender twins (boys are less cunning and more Spider-Man oriented, apparently). But the clip makes the list for Sidibe calling out Kimmel for being too chicken to watch AHS. Before she calls Kimmel a pussy, she asks how much the FCC fine is for. We love a callback.

2. 
John Hodgman Goes Full Mainer on The Daily Show

John Hodgman has written multiple excellent books about feeling like an outsider in his chosen home of Maine, so it was great that he could bring that anxiety onto The Daily Show to explain why Susan Collins keeps winning there. His Mainer accent is on the right side of believable versus sketchy, his propwork with the lobster roll is top-notch, and he gets to the guts of the issue: Big-city pundits can only make things worse with their condescending commentary. It’s a good puffer vest, too.

1. 
The Oldest Baby Crushes on Late Night

They say never work with children or animals because they’re unpredictable. But what if that unpredictability works in your favor? Late Night With Seth Meyers got a transcendent performance out of a child actor on Tuesday’s “At This Point in the Broadcast.” If you’re unfamiliar with the segment, it posits that Seth pops off during the monologue and what he says is unairable. But because they need to fill the time, they just air the muted footage with a narrator (Ben Warheit) describing the onstage mishegoss. This time, the focus of the piece was healthmaxxing and that guy who keeps transfusing his blood in order to lower his age. To heighten that already absurd idea, the show used a child actor to play an 85-year-old man who has healthmaxxed his way to a kid’s body. This kid was serving Drunk History realness with how well he lip-synced Warheit’s narration and the gravitas with which he did it. Not since “Wells for Boys” has a child actor delivered on a premise so well. Get this kid signed to Brillstein Entertainment Partners stat!