Late night hosts temper America's new surge of optimism, hit Romney's rough reception, Flynn's Pledge fail

"Here's something positive to kick things off: A new poll shows that almost two-thirds of Americans are feeling optimistic after President Biden's first 100 days in office," Jimmy Fallon said on Monday's Tonight Show. "Of course we're feeling good — we've got vaccines in our arms, stimulus checks in our pockets, and hot sauce on our Goldfish." The last time "we were close to being this optimistic was 2006," he said, "when Tom Hanks brought back the mullet."

Verizon's $5 billion sale of Yahoo and AOL "is already being called the most successful tech sale of 1999," Fallon joked. "I didn't even know Verizon owned Yahoo and AOL. That's like finding out Apple owns RadioShack. ... It was telling when they emailed the news to the heads of Yahoo and AOL and they both had Gmail addresses."

The Daily Show's Trevor Noah followed Fallon's "You've Got Mail" joke with a Norton Antivirus analogy for America's projected herd immunity failure. "Thanks to the many people who refuse to take a lifesaving vaccine, experts now think that coronavirus is basically going to become one of those antivirus popups — you know, we're gonna minimize it, but we'll never really delete it," he said. "In these divided times, it's just great to see all Americans coming together to fail at something so easily achievable."

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That poll showing "a new sense of optimism" in America was also "conducted before we found out Elon Musk is hosting Saturday Night Live, so we'll see if it holds up," Jimmy Kimmel said on Kimmel Live. Condom sales are up, and in Las Vegas, "gamblers are vaccinated and ready to lose their whole stimulus checks," he said. "But just up the 15 in Utah, Sen. Mitt Romney had a rough weekend," getting "booed relentlessly by his fellow Republicans."

"I've never seen rude behavior from a group of Mormons before," Kimmel said, but the raspberries for Romney were "music to the ears of one Donald J. Trump," who released a statement cheering Utah Republicans for jeering "stone cold loser" Romney. "Speaking of stone cold losers," he added, Michael Flynn "spoke at a rally of Trump supporters in South Carolina yesterday, and for an ex-military guy who wraps his misdeeds tightly in the flag, he sure did have trouble coming up with the words to the Pledge of Allegiance."

Tooning Out the News found a way to save Romney from the rough GOP crowd. Peter Weber