On Wednesday morning, hours before Jimmy Kimmel would go on to be pulled from ABC indefinitely after incurring the ire of the FCC, the New York Times’ arts desk tweeted their “Best of Late Night” morning roundup. The joke they highlighted? Jimmy Fallon’s quip on NBC about Donald Trump ’s trip to the United Kingdom, in which Fallon said that Trump would need to return home by midnight, or else his carriage (or, confusingly, Trump himself?) might turn back into a pumpkin.
That, perhaps, is the only kind of political humor that is still safe: Gesturing toward a punchline while risking nothing, saying nothing. It’s not hard to notice that, much like the carriage-riding Trump of his joke, Fallon is a Cinderella figure these days. In Trump’s first term, his position among his peers slippe