After watching traditional news coverage of Osama bin Laden's death at the hands of U.S. forces Sunday night and Monday morning, perhaps you tuned to "lighter fare" for a few laughs. But if you wound up watching, say, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, David Letterman and Craig Ferguson, you got a lot more, and a lot more thoughtful perspective, than you may have been expecting...
On Monday's Late Show with David Letterman on CBS, the host spent the bulk of the show interviewing Brian Williams, the NBC anchor whose conversation -- all about the raid on Bin Laden's Pakistan urban compound -- answered many questions, and addressed many facets, that many mainstream news outlets omitted.
Williams even showed a very human and subjective side, using the term "pissed" when describing his feelings upon learning that the Al Qaeda leader, instead of toughing it out in some remote cave hideaway, was living a life surrounded by creature comforts in a city in Pakistan. The interview -- a true conversation, really -- was fascinating. It allowed both men -- one a newsman, the other an entertainer -- to shine. And, often, it allowed them to switch roles. Letterman asked some probing questions, and Williams, in the midst of it all, got off some very funny laugh lines.
On Monday's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the host, like the show, was flawless. A half-dozen different titles were given for this special report about Bin Laden, updated and swapped out to get more laughs. Nothing made me laugh more, though, than Stewart's adopting his mob accent to demonstrate that Abbottabad, where Bin Laden was located and killed, sounded like a place New Yorkers would have made up.
Stewart also delighted in the fact that Obama delivered the news of the raid, in prime time, right in the middle of the boardroom session of NBC's Celebrity Apprentice, pre-empting his very vocal critic Donald Trump. The correspondents were just as sharp (John Oliver couldn't stop talking about the Royal Wedding), and the entire show was SO smart, it delighted, amused, amazed and informed me in equal measure.
And when Stewart's Comedy Central co-hort, Stephen Colbert, launched into his The Colbert Report, he led the audience in a chant of "USA! USA!" that could have been satirical... but didn't seem to be.
"Seth Meyers did a great job at the [White House] Correspondents' dinner," Colbert said at the show's open. "But I gotta say, this weekend, Barack Obama really killed." And he kept going from there.
"Oh, folks," Colbert said, talking about his own enthusiasm, "I am as giddy as a schoolgirl who just shot bin Laden in the eye. In the eye!"
Then he added, only a bit sheepishly, "I hope I am never again this happy over someone's death."
I was happy, though, when Colbert reached into the clip drawer to show the Munchkins talking about the Wicked Witch being "most sincerely dead."
And again, when he showed a clip from the White House Correspondents' dinner, and Meyers making a joke about bin Laden hiding out by hosting a daily show on C-SPAN -- and President Obama laughing at the joke, knowing the secret mission that would be launched the very next day.
And finally, over on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, that show's host waited until the right time in his monologue to deliver the same line he's delivered nightly for years: "It's a great day for America."
But Monday night, he let it hang there, and resonate, until you realized: On this day, that phrase had more meaning, and a more timely correlation, than ever before.
All four shows made me laugh. But all four shows also made me think.