From SNL to Late Night to the attic
Meyers still hitting on all cylinders despite the challenges of working from home
Seth Meyers, 46, is a comedian, writer, actor and host of Late Night With Seth Meyers. He was previously a cast member and head writer at Saturday Night Live. Last month, we caught up with him to chat about working from his attic, the switch from SNL to Late Night, and what led to his big break.
Q What’s it like doing the show in your attic? You’re used to doing it in front of an audience — are you the only one in the room?
A Yes, I am. And as much as I love my wife, she’s a silent observer who would only rattle any little shreds of confidence I have left. (Laughs.)
Q So have you had to kind of recalibrate now that you don’t hear, or pause for, laughter?
A In a perfect world, people are laughing so hard, you have to stop. That’s never going to happen here. And so you ultimately just plow ahead. But you don’t want to just talk so fast because you obviously are hoping people at home laugh, too. It’s that weird thing of trying to balance when you tell a joke and how long you wait until you tell the next one . ... I would hope that people watching at home can tell that we appreciate the weirdness of it and are trying to adjust accordingly.
Q So when you got a job on SNL yourself, it must have been a dream come true.
A Oh, my — yeah. Beyond. I always remember the first day being on SNL. There are pictures of everybody who’s ever been on the show, head shots from their first week on the show. The first day you walk down the hall, you see, like, Eddie Murphy and Chevy Chase and Will Ferrell.
Q At the White House correspondents’ dinner in 2011, you said, “Donald Trump has been saying he’ll run for president as a Republican, which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke.” ... People have said that the evening may have been critical in cementing his resolve to run for the presidency. Do you think that’s the case? If it were, would you have done anything differently?
A Well, that’s an impossible bit of time travel. (Laughs.) But I should say, I don’t think that anything I did was out of line. Lest anyone forget, (Trump) wasn’t just an ordinary citizen who just happened to have a seat at that dinner. He was a birther, just basically banging the drum on the idea that the president wasn’t from this country, which is as racist today as it was then.
Q You’ve called the president a liar, incapable of uttering truth, amoral. Do you ever worry that so much focus on Trump actually fuels the fire and makes him more popular, rather than actually holding him to account?
A I don’t know. I could see both sides of it. But it’s not just, “Hey, welcome to A Closer Look, the president’s a liar.” It’s like: “Hey, here’s A Closer Look. Here’s what he lied about today.” Somebody has to say they’re lies. I don’t think you can just let the president talk without calling in the lies. I mean, for me, it’s more frustrating when someone says he has an “interesting relationship with the truth.” That seems to be some soft middle that doesn’t do anybody any good. And we do try to point out more often than not that a lot of what Donald Trump is doing and a lot of what he’s getting away with are things that were put in place decades ago. One of the biggest mistakes is to think that a lot of it will be different post-Trump era. Hopefully we’ll continue to point out hypocrisy. Because I don’t think there will be a shortage of it.
I think there will be less ‘Can you believe what happened today?’ I don’t know if there will be things as baldly comic in the way that hypocrisy is displayed as they are now.
Q You moved from SNL to hosting Late Night and chose a mix heavier on politics and current events.
A The first time we did A Closer Look, we didn’t think something that’s 10-12 minutes long about politics would hold people’s attention as well as it did. And then, you would be out and about, and that was the thing, more often than not, people would tell you they liked on the show. And that was nice, too, because it was the biggest chunk of the show. It would be a bummer if people said, “You know, my favourite is that 30 seconds at the end where you say good night.”
Q This country has seen a lot of difficult moments recently, but in this moment, in this pandemic, does being able to interact with the world in this way have a different significance?
A Well, the main significance is that we’re still able to do it. I feel so incredibly lucky that we’ve found a way to do the show in the extreme circumstances. I think I would feel very lost without it right now. It’s really hard to do it without the staff — one of the most joyous parts of doing the show is interacting with them. But it’s still doing the show, and I just feel like I certainly have more of a purpose with it.
Q So what was your big break?
A I was doing the Chicago Improv Festival with my comedy partner at the time. And someone from SNL was visiting family in Chicago and happened to go see a show. She worked in the talent department. And I remember I got a phone call saying they wanted me to send in an audition tape. And (laughs) — not to date myself, but it was very hard to know somebody with a camera. But it was a huge. I started a years-long process of sending in tapes until I finally physically auditioned.
Q We all have kind of golden moments in our lives, in our careers, when it feels like things are really just coming together. Can you talk about a moment like that?
A It’s strange, I walked offstage that night at the correspondents’ dinner very much feeling that it couldn’t have gone better. I had spent three weeks with seven writers working on that, and we wrote so many jokes. And I’ll be honest: The hard part wasn’t that Donald Trump was in the audience. The hard part was that Barack Obama was on the dais. (Laughs.) I think there are tough comedians to follow, but I would argue there’s nothing quite as hard as following Barack Obama at the correspondents’ dinner.