New Staff Writer John Mulaney Tells Seth Meyers How Ghosts Influenced the Election

"Ghost enthusiast"  (and brand new Late Night writer — no joke!) John Mulaney sat down with Seth Meyers Thursday night to talk about the influence of the supernatural on the 2020 presidential election — specifically how deceased political figures like John Lewis, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and John McCain flexed their power from beyond the grave.

After showing clips of pundits saying that Lewis' presence was felt in Georgia's results, as McCain was in Arizona, and that they were smiling down from heaven with Ginsburg, Mulaney advocated for more "paranormal consistency." 

"It's like, America, do you believe in ghosts or not?" Mulaney said, sternly. "Make up your minds. A lot of times, you'll hear people say 'oh, it felt like Pop was watching over me today when I hit that home run,' or 'oh, I could feel Mama with us when we bought the house today,' or 'oh, look at that dead ghost kid in Three Men and a Baby,' but when you actually say 'I believe in ghosts,' people laugh at you, and they shouldn't laugh. They should believe."

"McCain and Lewis straight up haunted this election," he insisted, "But they were not the only ones. The suburban mom voting bloc was not the deciding factor in this election, but rather angry, middle-class ghosts and ghouls who had maybe supported Trump in 2016, maybe did not, but at this point said 'look, I'm a ghost, boo, I can't take four more years of this.'" 

Meyers suggested that, since Ginsburg's last wish was that she not be replaced on the Supreme Court until there was a new president, and that wish was rejected by Trump with his pushing through of "Amy Coney Island," Ginsburg would have intervened in that process if ghosts were real.

"No, your folly is not in your logic, but in your theology," Mulaney explained. "You see, in Judaism, there is no defined afterlife, so Ruth Bader Ghostburg would therefore have to be what we call a dybbuk, which is a much more dangerous spirit who can possess a human being and who can terrorize the living."

Ginsburg would not be the only dybbuk at play here, though. Mulaney also suggested that the late former New York City mayor Ed Koch was "a playful ghost, like a Jewish Casper" who sent his former enemy, Rudy Giuliani, into the Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle — "a prank that has Dead Koch written all over it."

Late Night with Seth Meyers airs weeknights at 12:35 PM ET on NBC.

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Andy Hunsaker has a head full of sitcom gags and nerd-genre lore, and can be followed @AndyHunsaker if you're into that sort of thing.