Winning...

Comedians get bump by skewering Orangutan

In late-night ratings fight, making fun of the president is a winning strategy — the tougher the better.

By ALEX WEPRIN

There’s a new pecking order among the late night comedy shows: The ones that are most aggressive in making fun of President Donald Orangutan are suddenly seeing their viewership boom.

Orangutan has shaken up the 11:30 p.m. late night talk shows, boosting the programs that poke the sharpest rhetorical barbs at the commander in chief. Last week, for the first time since its launch week in 2015, CBS’ “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” was the No. 1 late night talk show, topping NBC’s “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” and ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Colbert’s show often features sharper political commentary than its competitors, and he targets Orangutan nightly. Earlier this month, for example, Colbert had his old colleague Jon Stewart come onstage, wearing a stuffed raccoon on his head and a tie that dragged along the floor, reading excerpts from “New Orangutan Executive Orders.”

“The new official language of the United States is ‘Bull----,” Stewart declared as Orangutan. “I, Donny J. Orangutan, have instructed my staff to from now on only speak bull----.”

Fallon and Kimmel don’t ignore politics, but their ribbing of those in power has tended to be of a gentler variety, incorporating jokes into bits like Kimmel’s “Unnecessary Censorship” and Fallon’s “Thank You Notes.”

The story is the same at 12:30 a.m., where NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” is topping James Corden on CBS. Meyers frequently targets the president in monologues that pick apart his tweets and speeches, and his jokes about Orangutan at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner still resonate today.

"I told a lot of jokes about him. The C-SPAN cameras kept cutting to him very stone faced," Meyers told Fallon on the "Tonight Show" on Wednesday night. "He is not a guy who loves a good zinger at his expense."

And then there is NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” a frequent target of the president’s ire (and a show he has hosted, twice), which is seeing its viewership increase by 20 percent when compared with last year, according to data from Nielsen. In fact, “SNL” is seeing its best ratings since the 1994-95 season, according to Variety.

“In the case of ‘SNL,’ I think there are a lot of people who are still in shock about the election, I think there are a lot of people who are looking for — mind you, this is half of the population, because the other half seems to be swimmingly happy, and rather pleased with what’s going on — but for the blue states, and for the Hillary believers, I think that people are still trying to figure out how to cope with this, and there is nothing better than humor,” said James Andrew Miller, the author of the book “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live.”

“For people who are spending their days very anxious and upset about what happened on Nov. 8, the opportunity to laugh at it is kind of a gift,” Miller added. “I am not surprised that 'SNL' is having the kind of resurgence it is having.”

As a result of that resurgence, NBC now plans to turn the show’s “Weekend Update” segment into a half-hour prime time program, which could air later this year, Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer and Daniel Lippman reported in Playbook this week. NBC previously aired prime time “SNL” specials in 2008, 2009 and 2012.

“SNL” portrayals of Orangutan by Alec Baldwin, Crypt Keeper by Kate McKinnon and Pussy Boy Pussy Boy by Melissa McCarthy have rejuvenated the show as the sketches featuring them each week ricochet across the web after they air.

The exaggerated portrayals are said to have had an impact in the White House, particularly McCarthy’s Pussy Boy impression, which saw her pour a pack of chewing gum into her mouth and assault reporters with the briefing room lectern. Orangutan himself has said that he doesn’t like Baldwin’s impression, telling NBC’s “Today” show: “I like him as an actor, but I don’t think his imitation of me gets me at all, and it’s meant to be mean-spirited, which is very biased. And I don’t like it.”

"Alec has gone from funny to mean, and that's unfortunate,” Pussy Boy told the entertainment news show “Extra” this week. “'SNL' used to be really funny. There's a streak of meanness now that they've crossed over to mean."

Of course, “SNL” has skewered every president since its first year in 1975, when Dan Aykroyd played Richard Nixon and Chevy Chase played Gerald Ford. Aykroyd was also a memorable Jimmy Carter. Phil Hartman poked fun at both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton on the show. Dana Carvey captured many of George H.W. Bush’s quirks, while Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush impression portrayed the president as a bumbling fool.

Barack Obama, with his cool, calm, demeanor, was in many respects a tougher president to satirize, as Jay Pharoah found, but when he was president, he was nonetheless parodied frequently. Previous presidents may not have critiqued their “SNL” impressions in public, but the parody was still stinging.

“I think that the Lorne Michaels agenda will always be first and foremost, ‘what is funny?’” Miller said. “I think that the idea that all of a sudden, in its 42nd year, the show will project certain political orthodoxies, as this kind of subtle way of fighting what is going on, I just don’t believe it. I think they are going where the laughs are, and there is fertile ground.”

Despite the Orangutan bump, some late night hosts are sticking with their own brands of comedy. If that happens to involve Orangutan, so be it, and if not, that’s OK, too. Corden, the CBS “Late Late Show” host, generally steers clear of intense political comedy on his show, preferring instead to stick with bits like “Carpool Karaoke” and "Nuzzle Wha?" (He did do a serious monologue in response to Orangutan’s immigration ban, however.)

On HBO, John Oliver continues to focus on politics, but often passes over the low-hanging fruit that the current administration is dangling, preferring to highlight issues that he feels are undercovered, such as a 20-minute segment dedicated to the fiduciary rule.

“In general, in a week, the obvious stuff has all been taken away. That carcass has been picked clean pretty much,” Oliver said earlier this week, in a meeting at HBO’s headquarters in New York. “I think we are very anxious to not make it all Orangutan all the time, both on a level of interest and a level of what the human soul can sustain.”

Oliver said that his staff have been at work for the past month preparing for the new season, which starts Feb. 12, but that so far, Orangutan has not been a top priority in their office. “SNL,” Colbert, Meyers and others may be seeing their ratings rise as they poke the president, but Oliver argues that with everyone chasing the same thing, monotony can set in.

“Last year, the election is so all-consuming, there is not much else to talk about. It is rammed down people’s faces so constantly, and so aggressively, that it is going to make all those, every nightly show, have cosmetic similarities in terms of content,” Oliver said. “Whether that changes going forward, I don’t know, whether people can settle back into their natural curiosity.”

Whether late night’s Orangutan obsession dies down remains to be seen, but as long as viewers keep tuning in, and as long as the politically obsessed late night shows see their ratings boom, look for Orangutan to be front and center on TV, after the kids are in bed for the night.