Stephen Colbert makes sense of the Reddit-GameStop stock debacle in movie form
The Wall Street Bets crowd from Reddit succeeded in one mission: It successfully stripped the humor out of late-night TV hosts’ shows on Thursday night as Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah and James Corden attempted to explain the GameStop situation to their viewers.
The takeaway: Neither the hosts nor their writers have a great grasp on the short-squeeze situation involving stocks from GameStop (and AMC Theatres, and BlackBerry, and Tootsie Roll Industries).
The GameStop stock market revolution has inspired a slew of viral tweets, including one from L.A. comedian Avalon Penrose that’s racked up 13 million views.
Colbert and Corden both stooped to Beanie Baby analogies, with Colbert winning that challenge with graphics featuring myriad bright-red Beanie Lobsters. Corden had no lobster. Not even one (even though Pinchers is reportedly worth $3,500).
Trevor Noah enlisted “Behind the News” host Doug Henwood to dryly explain that Wall Street is simply “a game to try to outwit your competitors ... and run away with the most money” and the folks from Reddit are just “the wrong kind of people,” as far as the Street is concerned.
Again, no lobsters. Though the other day Noah did try an explanation with his face on Margot Robbie’s body in a bathtub.
That said, Colbert’s team did spin up an homage to the flash-mobby traders in the form of a movie trailer for “The Wolf of Couch Street” — riffing on Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” — which charts the thrilling stonks escapades of one NarwhalWizard8 from his perch on an orange sofa.
A deep probe of the drama involving Robinhood would cast a rare spotlight on arcane parts of the stock market designed to prevent catastrophe.
“I spend most of my time on Reddit watching dashcam footage — awesome,” NW8 says in a voiceover, “but then I stumbled on this subreddit, Wall Street Bets, and now me and my online friends have Wall Street in a panic.
“My life is less of this,” he says as scenes roll showing Leonardo DiCaprio living the high life in the Hamptons as Jordan Belfort, the former trader who was ultimately convicted in 1999 of felonies related to stock-market manipulation, “and more of this.”
Cut to a dude on a couch messing around on his phone and eating a bowl of cereal.
“Cool. Just made 50 bucks,” says NarwhalWizard8. Less “making it rain” on half-naked women and more, um, phone-fiddling and gaming from that same couch.
The day-trading app just blocked some stocks that had rocketed in price on a wave of financial brinksmanship. Now everyone is mad.
A scene in which a shouting DiCaprio roars “$10,000 to shave a ... head!,” featuring a beautiful woman getting all her hair cut off, bleeds into a scene with Narwhal clipping his toenails. In silence. On the couch.
And that’s it. That’s the gag. The jokes stop here.
Of course, none of this stopped social media from taking its own stab at GameStop-related humor — with arguably more success. Think of this as an after-dinner mint to cleanse your lobster-flavored news palate:
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