With Stephen Colbert canceled, and Morning Joe in perilous straits as MSNBC is discarded by its parent company, could Joe Scarborough be making a pitch for a late-night gig?

The question arises in light of Scarborough's antics and bell-ringing stunt this morning, bringing to mind a late-night host's desperate bid for laughs.

Scarborough went on a rant against Tulsi Gabbard's White House briefing room appearance in which she laid out accusations against Obama in connection with Russian-collusion conspiracy claims about the 2016 election.

During vaudeville days, a judge would ring a bell to remove failed acts from the stage.

Claiming that Gabbard's performance fell below even the supposedly low expectations that had been set for her, Scarborough twice rang a bell [see screencap], and promised there'd be many more bell ringings throughout the show.

So Scarborough has plumbed pathetic new depths, descending to the level of vaudeville. He favorably cited a new Wall Street Journal column by Bush adviser Karl Rove suggesting conspiracy politics isn't going to work for Trump. 

Typically, Scarborough made no mention of how many times he and Mika have rung a rhetorical bell saying the "walls were closing in" on Trump over the Russian-collusion racket and other manufactured Trump scandals. 

Since Joe has decided to go vaudeville in an apparent attempt to appeal to the late-night-show suits, here's a thought. Before turning to movies and television, Groucho Marx was a famed vaudevillian. A regular feature of his "You Bet Your Life" TV show was to have a duck clutching a $50 bill descend from the rafters if the contestant said the Secret Word. Scarborough could do the same. Surefire suggestion for the first Secret Word: "Fascism!"

Here's the transcript.

MSNBC
Morning Joe
7/24/25
6:02 am EDT

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Tulsi Gabbard, and what was that yesterday? Seriously? Talk about playing down to the lowest of low expectations. Tulsi, congratulations. You just did it. 

And I think you may, I think expectations may have been here, and I think you may have gotten, you can't even see it on the TV screen, but if you can see my right hand down here, [pounds table] Tulsi Gabbard, you![rings bell] are the winner of, of, of actually meeting the lowest of low expectations that were laid out for you. 

But all of this stuff is just leading to chaos. And maybe the president thinks, hey, let's throw as much against the wall as we can throw against the wall. But as Karl Rove writes, let's see, it's in the Wall Street Journal opinion, there is a political price to conspiracy theories. We'll get into Karl's op-ed in a little bit. 

But they're actually seeing that price, and they're making these wild, outrageous claims. And I just, I don't think it helps the president. I know, it sure doesn't help the country in the long run. 

JONATHAN LEMIRE: Yeah, I heard you hit the bell there, talking about the DNI. 

SCARBOROUGH: Yeah. We don't do that much. Hold on, she's under [rings bell again]. There we go again. I just hit it again. 

LEMIRE: That underscores where we are, yeah. 

SCARBOROUGH: That underscores where we are. 

You know, sometimes, when you have baseball parks in the summer, somebody hitting a grand slam, like happened last night, for instance, with the Red Sox. But we'll talk about that later. Maybe fireworks will go up over a stadium, right? 

But here on Morning Joe, we ring the bell when Tulsi Gabbard meets her low expectations.