Stephen Colbert is laughing at Mark Zuckerberg—and not for the first time. While we all knew it was coming, on Thursday the Facebook co-founder and CEO officially announced that the company would be rebranding as Meta… and the jokes immediately followed. On Thursday night, Colbert kicked off his opening monologue with his own take on the name change.
While Colbert admitted that he has never had a Facebook page and does not get Facebook, even he was aware of how big the news was that the embattled social media giant was renaming itself Meta. “That’s right, Meta,” Colbert said. “As in your Aunt Gloria saying, ‘I meta guy on Facebook who says the vaccine makes his balls magnetic.’”
“Along with the new name, they have a new logo,” Colbert continued. “And of course, since this is the internet, in less than one minute, somebody drew a penis on it.”
“And, of course, then they put a dick next to it,” he added.
The jokes did not end there. After comparing Facebook to a dystopian universe, Colbert confirmed that the site you use to message with your mom because she thinks it’s her cell phone’s text feature will still be known as Facebook. “The company says the name Facebook is not going away,” Colbert explained. “‘From now on, we’re going to be the metaverse first. Not Facebook first,’” he read from a press statement—but told viewers, “Don’t you worry: The self-esteem of teenage girls will always be last.”
“The announcement came in a video by Facebook’s chief humanoid simulation Mark Zuckerberg, who addressed some of the recent controversy the company is going through.” Zuck did his best to make these references as general as possible, and focus on the future—and how any past mistakes only make them better equipped to learn and build a better place for people to gather on the internet. Zuckerberg also spoke about how the metaverse experience will be much better than the Zoom existence that’s become our new normal; that it will be a place where we can make eye contact and feel more connected to the people in our lives.
“And I enjoy making eye contact, because it is something that we as humans do in order to feel connections on an emotional level,” Colbert joked, doing his best Zuckerberg-as-a-soulless-robot impression. “A level I definitely have.”
You can watch the full clip above.
