Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers were more than ready to joke about Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday night, after President Donald Trump’s personal attorney was ensnarled in a compromising situation in the new sequel to Borat.
“Every four years, around this time of the election, people start to worry about an October surprise,” Colbert said on The Late Show. “Today, we got more than October surprised. We got October appalled.”
In his Late Night monologue, Meyers joked that the late-breaking Giuliani story came courtesy of Mad Libs. “Of course, the libs are at it again,” he joked.
As widely revealed on Wednesday, Sacha Baron Cohen’s new Borat Subsequent Moviefilm includes a lengthy scene in which Giuliani is interviewed by the actress playing Borat’s daughter (newcomer Maria Bakalova), who is posing as a journalist. After exchanging flirtatious banter and some playful touching (at one point, Giuliani grasps Bakalova’s hands and says he can “relax” the nervous reporter), the two are shown retiring to a hotel bedroom. There, hidden cameras capture Giuliani patting Bakalova on her lower back and asking for her phone number. After she helps him remove his microphone, Giuliani is seen reclining on the bed while stuffing his hands down his pants. At that point, Cohen barges in as Borat and stops the interaction before anything else transpires. “She’s 15. She’s too old for you,” Cohen says to Giuliani, who quickly exits. (In real life, Bakalova is 24, and her character’s age is never discussed with Giuliani previous to this moment.)
“Never a great sign when the moral authority in a situation comes from a guy who once handed a woman a bag of his own poop,” Colbert joked, referencing a scene in the original film.
The stunt was filmed this summer and immediately spoiled by Giuliani, who called the police on Cohen, then claimed in an interview with the New York Post that Cohen had failed to get the better of him. “I am a fan of some of his movies, Borat in particular,” Giuliani said at the time, before launching into his own impression of the Khazakstani reporter.