Seth Meyers & the 'Late Night' Team on Trump 2.0, No Punches Pulled
Emboldened, they tell me how they make smart comedy in an insane news cycle: 'The only way forward is forward'
Before we jump into today’s conversation with Seth Meyers and some of his show’s key collaborators, a heads-up that the full video of my onstage conversation with the High Potential team is now online and will be on the June 17 episode of the podcast as well.
As you’ll hear me say on tomorrow’s podcast episode with Joe Reid, in a world in which we’re celebrating Kathy Bates and Matlock for bringing a fresh perspective to the TV procedural, High Potential and its lead performance from Kaitlin Olson absolutely deserve the same level of acclaim. In our conversation, Olson revealed how involved she gets in the show’s very intricate scripts, and also how hard she pushed for High Potential to be an L.A. production — something that’s far rarer these days than it should be. Hear all about that and much more in the full video of the panel.
High Potential and Matlock have both been celebrated as part of what feels like a comeback season for network television, which is so often treated as an afterthought in the Emmy race. However, network TV accounts for a significant portion of the nominees in the variety and talk series categories. Late-night hosts, yes, still have to contend with John Oliver’s winning streak, but keep finding ways to innovate on one of television’s oldest formats.
Last year, I talked to Meyers for one of the earliest episodes of the podcast about the ways that NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers has evolved over its run (and the affectionate heckling he received from his stand-up compatriot Oliver). This year, I expanded the conversation to include Meyers and a number of his key collaborators — writer Amber Ruffin, also host of the spinoff Peacock series The Amber Ruffin Show, as well as head writers and producers Alex Baze and Sal Gentile.
I spoke to them about each of their respective segments — the opening monologue, “A Closer Look” and “Amber Says What” — while the show was on a hiatus week. But as you’ll read, being on a break from the show does not mean that they can let themselves off the hook on keeping up with an insane news cycle — not that they’d want to, anyway.
The Opening Monologue
Like so many things about Late Night — we’ll get to the singing sea captain in a moment — the pandemic transformed the way Meyers and Baze create the monologue. Baze gathers jokes submitted by the staff from the night before as well as the morning of the show. By noon, he’s winnowed down around 200 jokes to present 10 to 12 for Meyers’ consideration.
The curating used to happen with Meyers and the entire monologue writing staff in the room, a process of rejection so public that the famously nice Meyers tried to work around it. The host was supposed to mark the jokes that were good enough to be included, but as Baze recalls, “There would be times where Seth was reading so many jokes without marking any that he started to feel self-conscious about that. He would just write in small letters ‘no’ next to a joke so it looked like he was marking something.”
Baze and Meyers have worked together for 17 years, since SNL “Weekend Update” days, and Baze has developed what amounts to a sixth sense for knowing which jokes will work in that format. “Sometimes the joke will be six lines long and I’m like, it doesn’t matter what it says, that’s not going to work,” Baze says, with Meyers adding that he’d give that advice to any aspiring comedy writer.
Meyers describes their dynamic as being like an old married couple, which means that even praise comes with its own built-in back-and-forth. “Baze is our greatest living joke writer,” Meyers begins. “Thank you for calling me living,” Baze fires back. Meyers then tries out a few different versions of a retort, and I guess we’d have to ask Baze which joke is the most efficient: “I mean, obviously put that in italics if you print it.” Or how about, “Check back before you print that.” Maybe this one: “Well, if you call that a life.”
‘A Closer Look’
“Before Covid, we thought of ourselves as a show by sane people,” says Gentile, the writer responsible for what has become a hallmark sequence on Meyers’s show, “A Closer Look.” A deep dive into a pressing topic of the day, be it tariffs or the Trump-Elon feud, “A Closer Look” has the same rigorous research as an episode of 60 Minutes, delivered with the wry humor that Meyers has excelled at since his days at the “Weekend Update” desk.
So when Covid lockdowns forced the team to make the show from home, the Late Night staff and the audience were “all experiencing the same breakdown at the same time,” as Gentile puts it. The “Closer Look” segment stretched out and got stranger as lockdown continued, making room for a singing sea captain and other running jokes, among, as you might remember, some pretty major news stories in 2020.
When the show returned to the studio, Gentile says, “We tried to keep the DNA of that as much as possible, the randomness.” Given that the world has not gotten any more logical since 2020, the segment’s absurdism still hits a nerve. “I feel like a lot of people feel that way, the sort of exasperated craziness of the world around you,” adds Gentile. “Seeing that reflected in what you're watching is again another part of the communal experience.”
Meyers was thrilled to hear recently that a friend’s teenage children watch “A Closer Look” each morning, comparing it to the days when entire families might watch the nightly news together. “What Sal does that’s so impressive is with really just 24 hours since the last ‘Closer Look’ — ‘Hey, here's what happened today and here's what it means.’ And I feel like fewer and fewer people have anything like that in their media diet.”
‘Amber Says What’
At the beginning of each “Amber Says What” segment, Meyers sets up the premise that there are news stories the rest of the team doesn’t have time to cover — which, everyone agrees, is pretty much exactly how it really happens. Ruffin works on her segments in parallel with Baze, Gentile and the other writers, and credits the Late Night staff for keeping her up on the most resonant stories of the moment, way better than social media can.
“Its impossible to find out what everybody is talking about, overarching,” Ruffin says. “Because my TikTok — it’s Black, it’s gay, it’s braiding. That’s what I’m being fed. And then everyone else’s algorithm is just specifically for them.”
The Late Night team is now enduring its second Trump administration and somehow finds new ways to tell jokes about a figure who seemed to have worn out his comedy welcome in the 1980s. But few Late Night segments capture the combination of panic and outrage that define our moment as effectively as “Amber Says What,” particularly the one she performed the day after last year’s presidential election.
Meyers says he still thinks of Ruffin’s appearance immediately after the 2016 election, encouraging white Americans to “join the fun” of the anxiety Black people have known for years. Ruffin says it’s still true. “I feel like if you are Black, it’s always bad all the time,” she says. “But now everyone can come along for that ride. It used to be just us elbowing each other and being like, this is terrible. Now everyone gets to also feel equal parts terrible, and now we can laugh at it in it.”
What Comes Next
If the Late Night team has to endure a second Trump administration, at least they get to do it together. “When it was obvious what was going to happen on election night, my first thought was, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know if we can do this again,’” Meyers admits. “So even though I think the first hundred days were arguably as bad, if not worse, than what I expected, the part we can control — doing the show every day and trying to bring a joyous energy towards making something — that has gone better than I thought it would.”
With 60 Minutes still facing a lawsuit from Trump and the free press being challenged at every turn, I asked the Late Night team how it felt to continue making jokes at the expense of someone who very clearly cannot take one. Meyers says they have the support they need from NBC to stay the course, and that “the only way forward is forward.”
But just in case anyone is feeling litigious, Meyers emphasizes that “I just say what Sal writes.” And Ruffin, covering her bases, would like to add, “Sal also writes ‘Amber Says What.’”
Joking aside, it’s clear the bond between Meyers and his staff is stronger than any administration. “Nobody leaves the show,” Ruffin says. “It’s an excellent hang to be around these people.” Later in our chat, she suggests Meyers perhaps chose everyone with the foresight that they’d spend every day together for years. Not that she minds. “This show is home.”
