Some hosts — namely Late Night ’s Seth Meyers and The Daily Show ’s Trevor Noah — are more frequently breaking their usual rhythms to deliver serious monologues of disapproval concerning the president’s policies, the hyper-partisanship that’s paralyzed Washington, and the increasingly bold racism making its presence known in America every waking day.

So it’s not surprising that late-night TV took this past weekend’s deadly racism in Charlottesville seriously — but the depth of the resulting solemnity was still startling to see from shows whose first priority is usually just making people laugh.

“We went into the weekend worrying about Kim Jong Un starting a war,” Kimmel said as he opened his show, “and came out of it wondering if our president is cutting eyeholes out of his bedsheets.”

It was a slightly confusing statement from someone who typically ignores politics — but also a powerful one for those who no doubt tuned into The Tonight Show expecting an escape and got this instead.

In contrast to Fallon , Seth Meyers has made a name for himself in the past year by being straightforward whenever he finds something particularly frightening about the Trump administration, or identifies something worth exposing for its malice.