It’s been just about four months since late-night television went dark with the WGA strike. And with no end in sight to what developed into a joint strike with screen actors, America’s late-night hosts have seemingly been left with a lot of time on their hands.
While that might mean extra time for damage control for Jimmy Fallon in the wake of a damning report about The Tonight Show’s backstage culture, Fallon and the four other most prominent white guys on late-night TV—Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver—recently joined forces for a podcast called Strike Force Five that aims to raise money for their show’s staff members as the strike wears on. Their combined star power has already rocketed the Spotify show to the top of the podcast charts.
But as charmingly chaotic as the first couple of episodes have been, Thursday’s third installment was the first time listeners really got a chance to hear the hosts take a stab at joking about some of the biggest news stories they’ve missed since May—albeit without the help of their striking joke writers.
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Serving as de facto leader of the episode, Colbert asked his fellow hosts which stories they wish they had been on the air to cover during the strike. Kimmel didn’t miss a beat.
“For me, it’s 215 pounds,” Kimmel said, referring to Donald Trump’s Georgia booking record that claimed he had, as Meyers put it, a “football body.”
Colbert then pointed out that Muhammad Ali was 6-foot-2 and weighed 215 pounds in his heyday, just one inch shorter than the former president. That prompted Kimmel to reply, “Well, they’re practically the same guy, from a physical standpoint.”
“It is amazing that we missed three Trump indictments,” Oliver marveled, not to mention the “Russian coup attempt” that almost eliminated Vladimir Putin before “the most predictable plane crash in history.”
Meyers, for one, didn’t seem worried. “For everything we missed, crazier things will happen when we’re back,” he said, adding that they probably missed the opportunity to joke about Trump claiming he’s 215 pounds “because I don’t think he can hold that weight.”
“What I will say is that if Mark Zuckerberg does fight Elon Musk in the Colosseum in Rome, I am breaking the strike,” Oliver joked.
