Stephen Colbert gets punchline happy over Roy Moore's mall banishment

Stephen Colbert jokes and jokes about Roy Moore being banished from a mall

(Image credit: Screenshot/YouTube/The Late Show)

Roy Moore's girl problems in Alabama got worse when a New Yorker reporter found out that the GOP nominee for a Senate seat in Alabama was so notorious for hitting on teenage girls at the local mall in Gadsden, Alabama, when he was a 30-something assistant district attorney, he was banned from the mall. The punchlines practically write themselves, but The Late Show staff wrote them anyway, and Stephen Colbert delivered them Tuesday night. The audience had a pretty big reaction to his setup joke. "If you like that one, this is going to be a long 4 minutes," he said.

Colbert started the one-liners immediately and kept going. "The only place in the mall the girls were safe was Forever 21, because that is way too old for Roy Moore," he said. Noting that Moore liked to dress up to walk the mall alone, Colbert deadpanned: "Well, that's just Roy Moore's approach to romance: Put on your finest slacks and go a-food-courtin'." One girl said Moore met her at the Santa booth when she was a 14-year-old elf, so Colbert went there: "He hit on one of Santa's elves? Well, a true evangelical, he's putting the 'Christ!' back in Christmas." And he ended with a 1980s-style commercial for Gadsden Mall, with a very special selling point. Watch below. Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.