Awesome / The Nightly Show

2015

• January 20nd: During the second episode, Larry literally had the balls to tackle the Bill Cosby rape allegations story, and boy did he pull no punches, but the highlight has to be…
  Larry: By the way, if you're someone who thinks it makes a difference whether Cosby raped 35 people or just 34 people, please fuck off forever.
• March 10th: After an Oklahoma fraternity was shown singing a racist frat song, Larry had this to say to his detractors who said the show focused too much on race.
  Larry: I'll stop talking about race when people stop being racist.
• April 30th: Larry goes to Baltimore, talking to local gang members who have joined together to protest the wrongful death of Freddie Gray at the hands of the Baltimore Police Department.
• June 4th: After Colorado teenager Evan Young is barred from delivering his valedictorian speech because he would use it as an opportunity to come out, Larry brings him on the show to deliver an abridged version of his speech on the air. The entire speech is later posted on The Nightly Show website.
• June 18th: After a gunman shot up a black church in South Carolina, killing 9 people including the church's pastor, who was also a state senator, Larry essentially dedicates the entire show to the Fox News Channel's insane denial that the gunman was racially motivated and constant attempts to spin the incident as an attack on Christianity, despite the fact that the attack being based on racism is almost literally impossible to make any more unambiguous than it is. For the record, the gunman not only wore Apartheid badges on his jacket during the incident, but was ranting about how much he hated black people and wanted to rid the country of them literally as he was committing the crime.
• June 23rd: Joe Morton as Rowan Pope, gives an epic speech to those who try to claim the Confederate Flag isn't a symbol of racism.
• June 24th: Larry takes down Bill O'Reilly for trying to say that institutionalized racism doesn't exist in America despite inviting only white commentators to discuss the subject, one of whom does try to rebut the assertion herself by asking how many black friends he has, which he tries to avoid answering.
• July 20th: Once the deposition of Cosby's rape allegations were revealed, Wilmore "uses a pudding pop to bust the weak points in the defense plan being floated by Bill Cosby's legal team."
• September 23rd: Larry interviewed Ahmed Mohamed, a high school student wrongfully arrested for making a clock that was confused for a bomb. Ahmed admits that getting arrested was cool because not only was there no bomb, if he went to court, "I knew I would win". Larry presents Ahmed with a joke-clock, then gives him an Apple Watch. Doubles as a Heartwarming Moment.
• October 15th: He quickly take down the notion of cops fearing they can't do their jobs because of the "YouTube Effect" or "Ferguson Effect": Fear of being caught on camera doing their job so they stop working. Larry asks the audience which is worse: Cop Embarrassed By Viral Video or Unarmed Black Man Gunned Down By Police.
• October 20th: After talking about incidents that involved toddlers killed by guns, he asks the NRA before he pokes holes in their "The only to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun" logic with this Armor-Piercing Question: "So what's next?"
• November 16th: After the Paris attacks stirred up a debate over the merits of calling Islamic terrorists "radical Muslims", Larry's response is a one-on-one discussion with a "radical Muslim" that can be summed up in this pragmatic exchange:
  Larry: So what do you do suggest we call them?
  Rizwan Fahad: I don't know; how about, uh, assholes?

2016

• January 5th: Larry's unabashed glee over the indictment of Bill Cosby during the show's Christmas break.
• January 27th: After a Twitter battle with rapper B.o.B., who has been claiming that the Earth is flat, Neil deGrasse Tyson makes an appearance on the show, explaining not only why he is wrong about the Earth being flat, but also why that kind of scientific ignorance among influential people contributes to a spirit of Anti-Intellectualism among ordinary people.
  Tyson: And by the way? This is called gravity!
  [drops the mic]
• April 18: Larry Wilmore calling out the government for pushing Harriet Tubman's appearance on the dollar bill to 2030 when before she would have replaced Alexander Hamilton on the 10 dollar bill by 2017. Harriet Tubman also appears and gets her two cents in, pointing out that most of the men on the dollar bill were responsible for the slave system that she undermined with the Underground Railroad. In addition, she worries that people will forget her and spells out her name: "The H-A-R-R-I-E-T" as a Homage to Hamilton

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