Doing comedy without the laughter

Seth Meyers is slowly getting used to broadcasting from his attic, said KK Ottesen in The Washington Post. The comedian has been hosting his late-night show alone from his makeshift home studio since the start of the pandemic. Nailing the timing of jokes and the pace of patter is difficult when there’s no live studio audience. “In a perfect world,” says Meyers, “people are laughing so hard, you have to stop. That’s never going to happen here, so you just plow ahead.” Still, he makes sure to leave pauses when the folks at home might be laughing. “It’s very uncomfortable to sort of dopily wait after a joke.” But Meyers has found performing without a live audience liberating in other ways. “You can do jokes that you’re confident would not go well in front of an audience, knowing that you don’t have to suffer through their awkward reaction to it.” He admits that if he were filming in a normal studio, he might not have done a recent bit on the astonishing similarity between a graph of Bhutan’s coronavirus curve and the Seattle skyline logo of TV’s Frasier. “There’s this nice thing of, ‘Hey, no one’s taste [matters] but me and the staff who have chosen these jokes.’ And everyone at home can judge them accordingly.”

Sedaris’ epic lockdown treks

David Sedaris is clocking the miles during the pandemic, said Sarah Lyall in The New York Times. Rather than remain cooped up in his Manhattan apartment while museums and restaurants are closed, the writer and humorist has been setting out on daily mammoth treks, walking the length and breadth of New York City. “I destroy everyone I’m a Fitbit friend of,” Sedaris says of his fitness tracker. “Like, I might be walking 130 miles a week, and they’re walking 30 miles a week.” Because he wears a face mask outside, he says, “everywhere I go it smells the same, and it smells like my breath.” His epic tours have allowed him to see the city at its most vulnerable hours, when it can become bizarre. “I was at Times Square at 1:30 in the morning and there was a guy in a wheelchair who was pushing himself along and he said, ‘Look at that clown.’ I thought he was talking about me. But then I followed his eyes and there was a clown, with purple hair and a red nose.” Recently, he has walked streets crowded with Black Lives Matter protesters. The demonstrators “are kind and thoughtful—always distributing snacks and water. Over time I came to think of the marches the way I think of buses and subways. ‘I’ll just take this BLM down to 23rd,’ I’d tell myself. Later I’d maybe get a crosstown BLM to Second Avenue, then walk home from there.”