The semi-annual Night of Too Many Stars benefit got one less star this month when headliner Louis C.K. was accused of—and later admitted to—multiple instances of sexual misconduct. So it was left to C.K.’s longtime friend, one-time defender and host for the evening, Jon Stewart, to decide whether or not to address the “elephant masturbating in the room,” as Sarah Silverman put it this week.
Unsurprisingly, Stewart kept the focus of the HBO-televised event on raising money for NEXT for AUTISM. “Tonight is about unity,” Stewart said. “It’s about putting our petty differences aside and rallying around an important cause. Not as left and right. Not as blue and red. But as one people, just now finding out that Puerto Ricans are Americans.”
To drive that point home, Stephen Colbert emerged from the wings to condemn Stewart’s “divisive” jokes, not to mention his politically incorrect comments about the dragons from Game of Thrones. Not to be outdone, John Oliver rolled his Last Week Tonight desk on stage to insult both of his former Daily Show colleagues.
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“This is going very badly and you are at the helm,” Oliver told Stewart. And to Colbert, he added, “You are doing more or less what I would expect for a man who serves up his nightly joke meatloaf to an audience full of unsuspecting tourists herded in from Bubba Gump Times Square.”
“Let me save this shit show,” Oliver added, arguing that that what the audience really needed was a “27-minute, exhaustively researched, commercial free, properly enunciated truth bomb.”
“Here we go, Harry Potter and the Half-Hour Lecture,” Colbert replied.
Just when you thought these three middle-aged men might murder each other, Full Frontal’s Samantha Bee appeared on a screen above them.
“Sorry I’m late, folks, I was working on a good excuse for not being there in person. Oh, look, Jon Stewart put on a suit again! We’re all supposed to bow down whenever he emerges from his burrow like a Borscht Belt Punxsutawney Phil to mansplain the world to us!”
“And, oh, what a shocker! They got another white male who thinks all dragons have dicks to host an autism fundraiser,” Bee continued. “God forbid anyone does anything to break up the charity boys’ club. This whole thing makes me want to start a new charity called ‘Godwill.’ As in, ‘God, will you please make him stop.’”
“Wow,” was all her male counterparts could say.
