"Last night, Oprah sat down with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle for a two-hour prime-time special," Jimmy Fallon said on Monday's Tonight Show. "We learned quite a bit," mostly that "the royal family is just as messed up as everyone else's." He recreated "the last phone call between Harry and Prince Charles" before Charles (temporarily) stopped taking his son's calls. Along with the brutal revelations, the interview was "a big event" because Harry and pregnant Meghan "revealed the baby's gender in California without burning down an entire forest," Fallon joked. And "the ratings were so big, ABC just offered the couple their own weekly show called Royal-ish."
Conan O'Brien imagined the queen and Prince Charles responding to the damning allegations — kind of — on their fictional podcast.
But the damage to the royal family was too big for even Bob the Builder to repair, in The Late Show's estimation.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Meghan and Harry told Oprah "their real in-law problems centered around their son, Archie, especially when the palace wanted to deny him a royal title and the accompanying security detail" at the same time someone in the royal family was expressing concerns about how dark Archie's skin would be, The Late Show's Stephen Colbert said. "I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there is a possibility — just a possibility, mind you — that this medieval selective breeding program might be racist," he deadpanned. Neither Meghan nor Harry would reveal who brought up Archie's skin tone, so Colbert played whodunit: "It's not the queen or Prince Philip, so that narrows it down to ... everyone else at the palace. It could be Charles, could be Camilla, could be the corgis — they're a bunch of bitches."
"Imagine after centuries of inbreeding, all of a sudden these people are concerned about the color of a baby's skin," Jimmy Kimmel said on Kimmel Live. "And by the way, they should hope that the kid looks more like Meghan than Harry — no offense." Prince Harry "said racism was a big part of their decision to leave — which, you know things are bad at Buckingham Palace if they came to America to get away from racism," he added. "It's like trying to get some peace and quiet at Chuck E. Cheese."
"Harry made a number of startling accusations," Kimmel said. "The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, vigorously denied all of them, just out of reflex." Peter Weber
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.