Everyone at ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ Should Go to Jail for the ‘Skibidi Biden’ Video

If Paul Shaffer beheaded David Letterman during their last episode of The Late Show, it still wouldn’t be the most horrific moment in the show’s history after what Stephen Colbert and his cronies did to us on Wednesday night.

In an age when many generations of potential voters all blend together in the nonsensical and multilayered fabric of social media, turning an internet presence into political action is a dangerous, complicated and often cringey endeavor for any lifetime public servant looking for a boost in the polls. 

That, I think, is the point that Colbert and the staff of The Late Show were trying to convey when they included a riff about a job opening in President Joe Biden’s campaign for a “meme page manager” in Colbert’s monologue. However, the video they created to graphically illustrate that point is so cursed, so upsetting and so profoundly misguided that it made me want to go out and vote for whichever presidential candidate would be most likely to launch nukes at the Ed Sullivan Theater before pointing them at our own homes. 

So, probably RFK Jr., if I had to guess.

While satirizing Biden’s attempt to appeal to the comedy sensibilities of the terminally online, the Colbert crew subjected Late Show viewers to “Skibidi Biden,” an act of cruelty so unconscionable that they all deserve to shoot next week’s episodes from the cells of The Hague.

For those out of the know who are presumably even more traumatized than those of us within it, “Skibidi Biden” is an unholy abomination based on the distressingly popular “Skibidi Toilet” YouTube series. Starting in early 2023, Georgian YouTuber Alexey Gerasimov, better known by his channel name DaFuq!?Boom!, began posting bizarre animated videos created in the sandbox computer game Garry's Mod that featured a singing head in a toilet bowl in increasingly strange circumstances. The videos are a massive hit among elementary school-aged kids who pump the view counts of each successive “Skibidi Toilet” episode into 11 figures.

Many Twitter users decrying the disgusting display put on by The Late Show have omitted the context in which Colbert presented “Skibidi Biden,” as they failed to understand that the video was intended to satirize the embarrassing efforts made by political campaigns to co-opt internet comedy for easy publicity. However, “Skibidi Biden” falls into that lowest-possible category of satire in which the creation is exactly as awful and artistically bankrupt (if not more so) as the target of its criticism, and the thin excuse of “self-awareness” fails to elevate the work above abject cringe.

“If you don’t understand that video, your grandchildren will explain it, and you still won’t understand,” Colbert advised his audience after the above clip cuts out. 

But, to those Late Show viewers who are still concerned and confused by “Skibidi Biden,” don't worry — we'll make Colbert carefully explain it all in court.