Stephen Colbert began Monday night’s “The Late Show” monologue with a somber, and heartfelt commentary about the horrific terrorist violence in Israel over the weekend, noting that “we hope and pray that someday peace is possible.”
But while explaining why he couldn’t possibly make jokes about the tragedy, Colbert did manage to find some ancillary humor by pointing out that even AI software like ChatGPT refuses to make such jokes.
Of course, by now you know about the Hamas surprise attack early Saturday morning on several places in Israel that border the Gaza strip. In addition to attacks from missiles and other long distance projectiles, Hamas forces also took hundreds of Israelis hostage and killed many more, provoking a devastating military response from Israel. Since then more than 1500 people in Israel and Gaza have been killed.
“The world is still in shock over the horrific surprise attack that Hamas launched this weekend against Israel,” Colbert said at the start of his monologue.
“The Middle East is a complex region, but the complexity of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is immaterial to the horror of this attack. It is heartbreaking to see violence escalate and we hope and pray that someday peace is possible,” he continued.
“Now on this show, we always try our best to talk about what everybody’s talking about today. but we didn’t even attempt to write jokes about this. The human mind simply refuses to do it. Even AI refused to do it,” Colbert went on. “Because we went on to ChatGPT. And this is true, it responded: ‘The Middle East conflict is a serious and ongoing situation that affects many lives, and making jokes about such matters can easily be seen as insensitive, disrespectful or offensive to those who are suffering as a result.’”
“I for one want to commend our future robot overlords. That is a rare show of humanity from something that can’t identify which photos contain a traffic light,” Colbert joked.
You can watch the entire monologue, which also contains a lot of jokes about Donald Trump, at the top of the page.