Jimmy Kimmel returned for his annual special after the Oscars Sunday night. And this time, the starring role went to Donald Trump.
The show featured a number of movie parodies, including the Creed send-off “Clubber” starring Tracy Morgan as Mr. T.’s Clubber Lang from Rocky III, but nothing could touch a re-creation of The Producers called “Trumped” with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.
In the original film and subsequent musical, Max Bialystok and Leo Bloom mount a production of “Springtime for Hitler” on Broadway, in an attempt to prove that, “under the right circumstances,” they can make as much money from a flop as they could from a hit. In Kimmel’s adaptation, they come to the same conclusion about Donald Trump.
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“First we find a bad candidate, then we raise money like crazy and promise all the donors an ambassadorship to Italy or Sweden or Armenia,” Broderick’s Bloom posits. “Then when the public figures out what a nutcase our guy is, he drops out of the race…” And they get to keep the money.
“This candidate, he’s got to be the worst candidate in history,” Lane’s Bialystok adds. “A real trainwreck. Schmuck, putz, gold-plated nincompoop. Where would we find a buffoon like that?” But they never could have anticipated what happened next.
As Trump’s lead continues to grow, they begin to realize what they have done. “How could this happen?” Lane’s exasperated Bialystok wonders. “I can’t believe this, it’s not possible. Where did we go right?”
“He’s building a wall, a thousand feet tall, don’t worry ’cause the Mexicans will pay for it all,” the pair sings during an elaborate production number complete with dancing girls in Trump masks. It’s almost as bad as Mel Brooks’s original lyrics: “We’re marching to a faster pace. Look out, here comes the master race.”
Kimmel also took his crack at some #OscarsSoWhite jokes that Chris Rock didn’t get to in his instantly legendary monologue. “The only way a black, Hispanic, or Asian actor was going to win an Oscar tonight was if they let Steve Harvey announce the winner,” he said. “And that didn’t happen.”
The big guest for the show was Ben Affleck, who was there to present some “new footage” from his upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but first he had to explain why he was wearing an enormous fat suit that made him look more like The Penguin. It turned out he was using the get-up to smuggle his friend and Kimmel’s longtime nemesis Matt Damon onto the set.
“This feels amazing,” Damon said to cheers from the crowd as he sat in what Kimmel insisted was not the guest chair. But in Kimmel’s words, “Nobody wants you here!” Ultimately, Guillermo escorted Damon out of the building.
