It was all space force, all the time during late night on Wednesday, with everyone cracking some kind of wise about Donald Trump’s idea to create a new branch of the United States military in outer space.
It was just too juicy a topic for the late-night comedians to pass up, and during Stephen Colbert’s monologue during “The Late Show” on Wednesday night he threw in some “Star Wars” jokes for good measure — it was solid timing by Trump, considering “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” got its digital home video release on Tuesday.
“Space force! Spaaaace force! Look, as long as J.J. Abrams directs and Mark Hamill has a cameo, I’m in!” Colbert joked, referencing the director of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and the upcoming “Episode IX,” and the actor who plays Luke Skywalker. But then Colbert brought the topic back down to Earth.
“But there’s no threat in space, who are we fighting? Satellites? A bunch of frozen monkeys? Elon Musk’s convertible? Why don’t we just build a space wall while we’re at it? Of course, you have to make it all the round so I guess it will be more of a space sphere, you know, like a moon. What would that look like, Jim?” Colbert asked as an image of the Death Star appeared on screen. “Oh my god! I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s no moon.”
Then Colbert mentioned the actual pop culture reference that probably inspired Trump’s space force idea — given his love of dated references like his purported nickname for Jeff Sessions, Mr. Magoo.
“If you think ‘space force’ sounds like an old 70s TV show…yep! ‘Space Force,’ from 1978, is ‘the comic adventures that befall a crew of astronauts assigned to a remote military space station.’ It’s ‘Northern Exposure’ in spaaaaaace! Fred Willard was in it,” Colbert said.
“Now, of course, even in this announcement, Trump can’t miss an opportunity to insult an opponent,” Colbert said before rolling a clip of his comment about how “very soon we are going to Mars” but “you wouldn’t have been going to Mars if my opponent had won. That I can tell you. You wouldn’t even be thinking about it.”
“Yes,” Colbert quipped, “If Hillary Clinton were president, we wouldn’t be so urgently trying to flee the planet.”
You can watch this portion of the monologue from Wednesday’s episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in the video embedded at the top of this post.