Last Night on Late Night
Late night hosts offer ideas for selling Americans on a COVID-19 booster shot, doubt the Taliban rebrand
"The Biden administration is reportedly about to recommend that we all get booster shots," Julie Bowen said on Tuesday's Jimmy Kimmel Live. "Good luck with that, Joe." America right now is "like one giant family dinner where half the table wants pizza and the other half wants to die of COVID," she said. "So let's just settle somewhere in the middle with pepperoni and staying alive."
"Yep, Biden will be making the booster shot announcement as part of his Operation Change the Subject," Jimmy Fallon joked at The Tonight Show. "And to sell Americans on the idea, the White House is hiring a movie trailer narrator to be like, 'This fall, Pfizer completes their epic trilogy.'"
Elsewhere in the world, "New Zealand just announced it's locking down the entire country over one COVID case — imagine being that one guy who tested positive," Fallon cringed. And "a Serbian hermit who has lived in a small mountain cave for more than 20 years just heard about the pandemic and emerged to get vaccinated. Which means even people literally living under a rock are trusting science. ... Twenty years in a cave, then on his way out of CVS he saw a magazine and was like, 'Oh good, Ben and J.Lo are still together.'"
It appears "we're gonna get a third shot, so somehow they're gonna have to make the vaccination card even bigger," Stephen Colbert said on The Late Show. "It fits in most midsized sedans."
In Afghanistan, "U.S. troops have restored order inside Kabul's airport, allowing evacuation flights to resume," Colbert said. "And when they're done there, maybe they could get them to restore order at our airports — cause there's a guy duct-taped to a seat in coach screaming about how masks are contaminating his sperm." The old Taliban was a "monstrously repressive regime, but this new Taliban claims they're a whole new Taliban," he said. "They're trying to come across as more moderate as they seek to rebrand themselves. Yes, they're saying they were the Taliban, but now they're the Tali-Buddies!"
They may be monstrous, but "did you see what the Taliban did in a weekend?" Seth Meyers said on Late Night. "Part of me is, like, put them in charge of the infrastructure bill." Meanwhile, "former President George W. Bush released a statement yesterday about the situation in Afghanistan, which is more than he did in office."