Colbert Takes Out BP (Literally): Late Last Night

  Colbert Takes Out BP (Literally): Late Last Night

Stephen Colbert was on fire last night on The Colbert Report, with a riff on the gulf oil spill. Colbert partnered with search engine Bing, who offered to donate $2500 to the Baton Rouge Area Foundation every time he said the name of their company. I generally hate product placement, but Colbert raised a ton of money for a good cause, and gave Google one hell of a name drop in the process.

Colbert continued the segment on the spill with an extended skit in which he hulks-out and goes to town on BP CEO Tony Hayward. While he does take a shot at the Knicks in the process, (Hey! We’ve got some…good…uniforms.) Colbert’s animal-assisted smack-down is pure wish-fulfillment. I really hope that whenever we end up charging the real BP execs it involves trial by combat with a shirtless Obama and some pissed-off dolphin sidekicks.

The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi traveled to Hacienda Heights to investigate the controversy around a program that teaches Mandarin Chinese to middle school students. The fear, of one pointy-haired lady at least, is that children would be indoctrinated with Communism from a young age. Or possibly be turned into Manchurian Candidate-esque sleeper agents. I don’t know how this woman’s language classes went, but when I took Spanish in middle school we didn’t do anything more complex than “where is the library”, never mind “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs”. That has passive voice and everything. Besides, I took a year of Chinese in high school, and the only side-effect is that I occasionally feel the urge to stand in front of tanks and invent the decimal system.

Jimmy Fallon‘s Late Night guest was Glee‘s Chris Colfer, who proved to be adorably awkward for a boy who can handle dancing in ten-inch heels. Colfer admitted to accidentally breaking an antique NBC lamp in Jimmy’s dressing room and seemed nervous, but I think NBC would only care if the lamp belonged to Jay Leno.

Chris Colfer also did some promotion for tonight’s finale of Glee, and let slip that the gang will be adding another Journey song to their repertoire. The gang’s rendition of “Don’t Stop Believing” went gold in digital sales, so it looks like Fox is looking to cash in with a new power ballad from the rock group. You know whatever it is that they pick is going to be all over the radio for the rest of the summer, so I really, really hope that they don’t try to replicate the music video for “Separate Ways”. I don’t think I can deal with that much 80’s.