Aside from providing cable news outlets with a daily — if not hourly — assortment of dumpster fires, the candidacy, nomination and presidency of Donald Trump has also served plenty of fodder to late night comedians. Most of it has ranged from seemingly passable to extraordinarily adept, though as previously-suspended Saturday Night Live writer Katie Rich discovered in January, some jokes about Trump can get you in trouble. And while Late Show host Stephen Colbert didn’t mention her joke about Barron Trump directly in a new interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the comedic limits of Trump-as-target are on his mind.
When asked whether or not anything pertaining to Trump was “off-limits” on his show, Colbert immediately referenced little Barron:
I don’t want to make jokes about [his 11-year-old son] Barron. We had some joke about how Jared Kushner’s got to save the Middle East and [deal with] Mexico, and I said [in the writers room]: “This is a lot. Can we give one of these jobs to Barron?” And we went, “Ahhh, make it Tiffany.” It’s not a joke at Barron’s expense, but it’s not even worth getting into that. Like, please, he’s just a kid. But Trump is the president, there is nothing about him that’s off-limits. What could possibly be off-limits?
Neither SNL, Rich nor Rich’s tweeted (and later deleted) joke about Barron — which drew a lot of criticism at the time — entered Colbert’s printed conversation with THR. Yet his allusion to possibly inserting the president’s youngest child into a joke at all, even if it wasn’t “at [his] expense,” was enough to encourage restraint. (Though not enough to save the older, but nonetheless 23-year-old Tiffany from The Late Show‘s roasting.)
These qualms notwithstanding, however, Colbert drove home the point that “there is nothing about [Trump] that’s off-limits” when it comes to late night comedy. After all, this is the same man who suddenly realized diplomacy isn’t easy.
(Via the Hollywood Reporter)
