You might assume that the President of the United States publicly, and messily, beefing with the world’s richest man would be a real layup for late-night talk show comedians. And you’d be right.
On Thursday night, hosts such as Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and several Jimmys relentlessly dunked on the two former best bros. And even more impressively, the unpaid randos on social media were able to quickly fill the internet with hilarious jokes about the objectively hilarious situation.
But on tonight’s episode of Real Time, Bill Maher, who had more than 24 hours to come up with some killer material, somehow didn’t have a single funny joke about the famous feud. Obviously comedy is subjective, and, personally, I’m not a big fan of Maher’s, but some of these lines were shockingly bad.
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Maher began his monologue by acknowledging the MAGA breakup, before adding “even worse, it’s Pride month.” Then he confidently chuckled to himself as if countless people hadn’t already come up with far better versions of this exact same joke.
He went on to observe that the Musk-Trump spat is like “Godzilla versus King Kong, if Godzilla was on ketamine and King Kong had a combover.” He then joked that “these guys were so close. It was like Brangelina or Bennifer. You know that Elon and Trump, they had their own couple name: ‘Elump.’”
If “Elump” wasn’t bad enough, Maher also had a bit about Trump saying “Mars is a shithole planet,” and he suggested that Elon will be going to the White House to pick up “that mixtape they made together.” Oh, and he described how “this is just a war that is going back and forth and back and forth. And the stakes are so high because the winner faces Blake Lively.”
Come to think of it, the Blake Lively reference is basically just a worse version of a joke that Fallon had already told on Thursday’s Tonight Show.
The only truly amusing moment of the monologue was a total accident: when Maher made an ill-timed Freudian slip. “Elon said, ‘Your tariffs are going to cause an erection’ – an erection?!?! Oh boy. A recession is what I meant to say,” Maher quickly clarified.
It was a lot funnier than “Elump.”
