Last Night on Late-Night

Seth Meyers Is Not Buying Kellyanne Conway’s “Alternative Facts”

“Kellyanne Conway is like someone trying to do the Jedi mind trick after only a week of Jedi training.”

Monday night brought a lot for late-night hosts to unpack—including the inauguration, Sean Spicer’s bizarre hissy fit of a press conference following the event, and Kellyanne Conway’s defense of Spicer’s presser, which called his obviously false statementsalternative facts.” And no one proved more fit for the task of lampooning it all than Seth Meyers, who joked his way through every amusing detail like the seasoned Saturday Night Live alum he is.

Meyers’s longtime S.N.L. gig as “Weekend Update” maestro shines through in most of his “Closer Look” segments—but Monday’s rapid-fire look at a packed weekend really highlighted Meyers’s finely-tuned comedy. He poked fun at the low attendance at both Donald Trump’s inauguration and the parade that followed, saying that ”there were more people on the bleachers during ‘Summer Lovin.’” He gleefully addressed the anti-Trump protests that covered every continent on the globe: “Imagine being so disliked that people are willing to go outside and protest you in Antarctica.” And he blasted Trump’s overall message at his inauguration:

“Just to clarify, Ronald Reagan said it’s morning in America. Trump is saying its morning in America, but like, early morning when you wake up hungover in a cold sweat and you realize you’re in Thailand and there’s a dead body in the bed next to you. The only sound you hear is cops banging on your door, and all you can think is ‘What the fuck is happening?!’ It’s that kind of morning.”

But Meyers’s take turned ominous when he got to Kellyanne Conway. On one hand, he treated her attempt on Sunday to brand Spicer’s lies as “alternative facts” with levity, saying, “Kellyanne Conway is like someone trying to do the Jedi mind trick after only a week of Jedi training.” Still, he noted there’s something far more sinister at work: “These may seem like small lies but the small lies inoculate us against bigger lies. They make facts a matter of partisan debate rather than accepted shared reality. It may be crowd sizes now, but soon much bigger decisions will come when reality will matter.”