Look, normally this column is about spreading the love: Here is what approximately five late-night shows did well this week. Aren’t we all glad topical comedy is still a viable profession for some? That’s the vibe! And this week had some bangers from other shows. I want to quickly shout out the return of Ariana Grande (Jimmy Fallon’s Teri Garr) to The Tonight Show, the way Jon Stewart called out his performative audience woo-ing on The Daily Show, the chemistry of the My Momma Told Me podcast co-hosts on After Midnight, and the deeply stupid pun businesses of “FaceButt” and “WhatsAss” in this week’s “Meanwhile …” for Stephen Colbert.
But these are extraordinary times — extraordinarily bad times, to be specific — and when it comes to news-based comedy, the guy who has been best equipped to thread that needle in the week and a half-ish since the election is Seth Adam Meyers, as well as the team he has assembled at Late Night.
Nobody expressed the “I’m sorry, I’m supposed to do my job?!” feelings of this past week like Amber Ruffin in her most recent installment of “Amber Says What.” Yeah, why are we pretending things are normal? Or maybe this is normal now? Who knows, and furthermore, who cares? Ruffin screamed into the void, and I, as a representative of the void, screamed back.
Monday’s “A Closer Look” segment also threaded a seemingly impossible needle: How do you, as a progressive-leaning person, address the stunning loss last Tuesday without shitting all over trans people? It’s a hurdle many failed to clear. Stewart’s analysis of the pundit class was perhaps more trenchant, but Meyers’s approach is exactly the kind of coalition-building take we need right now. Looking at how Bush was received in 2004 was also weirdly soothing. Sometimes it’s nice to know the times are precedented.
But the vibe went beyond the news-based humor segments of Late Night. Monday’s interview with Wendi McLendon-Covey also felt all too real, as a person who has tried desperately to Be Normal in convo with a fellow human being this week. It was mostly lovely banter about how McLendon-Covey is a goddamn treasure and a TV institution at this point, but there was a slight aside about Catholic saint Denis of France that I will be thinking about for months and perhaps years in the future. Denis of France’s whole deal, apparently, is that he kept preaching the gospel after being decapitated. It’s a cool, kind of metal story, like many martyrdoms. Meyers’s take? “It’s probably not worth it in the end, but you know what? Made the best of a bad situation.” The idea that becoming a martyr is “probably not worth it” is the funniest thing I’ve heard in years.
And finally, Meyers and John Lutz used the creeping tide of right-wing populism abroad as a stage for a “Who’s on First?”–ass sketch. Imagine if Mr. Show’s “Pre-Taped Call-in Show” sketch was topical and spoke on gains made by the far right in Europe, and you have the energy of this bit. These two boys really sell their double-hyphenate status, because the performance of this sketch is three times more important than the writing.
So to review, these are topical jokes that make meaning of an increasingly meaningless political landscape, an empathetic Yeah we all feel that way sketch, an interview that plugs the guest’s thing while simultaneously speaking to all this bullshit, and an Abbott and Costello–esque sketch about politics. Meyers and his team ran the table while the table was actively on fire.
