Yesterday I posted the baffling Hermain Cain ad that featured chief of staff Mark Block taking a drag from a cigarette and Cain breaking into a slow, creepy smile. It was obviously ripe for parody, and late-night hosts went after it with gusto. Conan O’Brien, David Letterman, and Stephen Colbert all created similar spoofs of the commercial. (I’m sure Jay Leno will tackle it some time early next year.)

Not only have I embedded the videos below, but I’ve also ranked them because I enjoy stirring up pointless discussion. For further reading on this matter, please see my defining work in the genre, EMILY > ZOOEY.

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People enjoyed yesterday’s Aubrey Plaza GIFs so much that I decided to post her appearance on Letterman last night. She looks great, and she’s really funny even though her unsmiling, deadpan delivery doesn’t make for the most lively interview.

Surprisingly, starting at the 5:30 mark, Plaza spends the second half of the interview talking about the stroke she suffered when she was 20 and a student at NYU. It’s the first time she’s ever discussed it on TV, and to my knowledge she never discussed it publicly before Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. Apparently she lost control of the right side of her body and was stricken with expressive aphasia (the inability to speak) for three days. And as we all learned from Serene Branson, expressive aphasia is hilarious. Scary, but hilarious. Like a bear in a sidecar.

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The Late Show with David Letterman (CBS) — Aubrey Plaza, AKA April from “Parks and Recreation,” is tonight’s first guest. In honor of this lovely and charming event, I’ll let April Ludgate GIFs present my opinions on tonight’s listings.

Hot in Cleveland (TV Land) — Season finale. Betty White’s character gets married.

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As I’ve stated before, I can’t watch David Letterman due to the rage blackouts I suffer when I hear or see Paul Shaffer. But Letterman can still pull some ballsy moves: on last night’s show, he reacted to a death threat on an extremist Muslim message board by basing his monologue and Top Ten list around the threat (videos below).

And why not? It’s not like the poster, someone using the alias Umar al-Basrawi, knows anything about Letterman:

“Is there not among you a Sayyid Nosair al-Mairi … to cut the tongue of this lowly Jew and shut it forever?” Al-Basrawi wrote, referring to El Sayyid Nosair, convicted of the 1990 killing of Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane, and to Letterman, who is not Jewish. [LA Times]

Dude, David Letterman’s from Indiana. If there are any Jews in Indiana, they’re only there by accident. Hell, I’ve made more serious death threats online. Not that the FBI needs to look into that. Let’s just forget I ever brought this up.

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Harrison Ford gave one of the strangest late-night interviews of 2010 with his spaced-out appearance on “Conan,” and now he’s taken the lead in 2011 with last night’s trip to Letterman’s couch. As the Cajun Boy noted at Uproxx, Ford is rumored to be one of the biggest stoners in Hollywood, and last night’s interview will do absolutely nothing to dispel that. Even after the oddity of the Conan appearance, it’s still jarring to see Han Solo/Indiana Jones/Jack Ryan on TV talking like James Franco.

The 15-minute interview is embedded below, and I watched the entire thing even though I have the attention span of a fruit fly. There’s so much to love: the spacey look on Ford’s face as he walks onstage, a surprisingly excellent series of Elizabeth Taylor jokes, Ford disparaging the Grand Canyon, his rambling introduction to the Cowboys & Aliens clip, and horseback riding. Yes, horseback riding (it’s what they called acting with Liz Taylor back in the day).

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