Worst Late-Night Jokes for the Week of January 8, 2024

Late-night comedy returned from its collective holiday vacation this week, but that doesn’t mean the hosts were hitting on all cylinders. 

Click right here to get the best of Cracked sent to your inbox.

The week got off to a bumpy start when Seth Meyers told this joke about the Bass Pro Shop debacle making all the meme rounds. You know it doesn’t land when Meyers has to explain the bit: “A man in Alabama was arrested recently after he allegedly crashed his car outside of a Bass Pro Shop, took off his clothes and jumped into the store's aquarium. But I’m not going to make a joke about that because it’s low-hanging fruit. Actually, after he jumped in the water, it became high-hanging fruit.”

After the joke died, Meyers added, “Anybody who doesn’t get it, stay after and we’ll do a… Baze, I think, told me he drew a diagram.  We should offer more, like, stay after if you didn’t get any of the jokes.”

Meyers wasn’t the only one apologizing for jokes this week. Here’s Jimmy Fallon stumbling backwards after his Tiger Woods joke didn’t land: “Nike and Tiger Woods just ended their 27-year partnership. Tiger’s about to be 50, so he’s trying to choose between New Balance and Florsheim. … It’s not every day you hear a Florsheim reference. Yeah.”

Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert got a muted response with this welcome-back message: “Happy New Year, everybody, a little belatedly but 2024 is finally here. Scientists warned us for decades that it would start on January 1st, and yet, we did nothing.”

And leave it to Fallon to make the Epstein joke that even Aaron Rodgers was trying to avoid vis a vis the Alaska Airlines malfunction: “The door blew off. You know you’re on a bad plane when it knocks Jeffrey Epstein’s plane out of the news.”

A day later, Fallon was at it again with another Epstein joke that elicited uncomfortable groans from the audience: “Trump said, ‘I found the Immunity Idol in a remote tropical location known as Epstein’s Island. That’s the only reason I was down there. To get this beautiful Immunity Idol. No other reason.’” 

In This Week in Parallel Thinking, the late-night comics decided that sketch artists were the best vehicle for describing Trump’s multiple court appearances in recent days.  Here was Fallon’s version: “Yeah, another court hearing for Trump. At this point, the courtroom sketch artist doesn’t even draw him. She just traces the grooves in her desk.”

While Jimmy Kimmel weighed in with his version of essentially the same joke: “Trump’s spent so much time at court the sketch artists are running out of orange pastels.”

Let’s end the week with this groaner from Colbert, nearly a week late with this joke about Golden Globes fashion: “Actress Gillian Anderson turned heads at the Golden Globes last Sunday when she wore a dress covered with embroidered vulvas sewn onto the skirt, custom-made by designer Gabriella Hearst. And not, as I expected, Dolce and Vagina.”