On May 1, 2023, Stephen Colbert returned to The Late Show stage after a week-long vacation to deliver the belated news that Tucker Carlson had also been off the air for a week. “The difference is: I’m allowed back on,” Colbert joked of the then recently fired Fox News host. But Colbert’s glee was short-lived.
Less than 30 minutes later, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) announced that its members would be striking for the first time in 15 years, leading late-night television—and essentially all of scripted entertainment—to go dark, and stay dark, for nearly five months. Some media critics viewed the strike as a potential death knell for late-night, and even some writers weren’t sure what the future might hold for the format.
“When you go off the air for five months, you just don’t know what it’s going to be like when you come back,” Sal Gentile, the writer behind Late Night with Seth Meyers’ “A Closer Look” segments, told The Daily Beast. “As galvanized and inspired as we all were, [the strike] was very hard. It was very kind to hear everybody say how much they missed ‘A Closer Look,’ and it was very gratifying when we came back to see that that was the case… and for that connection to still be there.”
Just as challenging for Gentile: All the missed opportunities to joke about former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani—one of the segment’s favorite targets, with whom the writer cops to having a “pathological obsession” for being “both such a cartoonish figure and also, even more so than Trump in some ways, such an avatar of what has happened to this political movement.”
“Anytime Rudy did or said anything over the course of the strike, I was permanently carving a list into my wall,” Gentile joked. “I’m so proud of the Guild and of the writers. [The strike] was a righteous cause and a just cause and we won in the end, so it was absolutely invigorating and inspiring. But every time something happened, we were making a list… I kind of knew instinctually that, when we come back, Seth is going to take one giant breath and he’s just going to say everything that happened while we were gone.”
That sustained excitement to have late-night television back extended beyond Late Night. The forced hiatus seems to have strengthened the appetite for midnight-ish TV consumption in general, with many hosts seeing increased ratings since their returns. Even Jimmy Fallon, who has only kinda sorta publicly nodded to the damning reports that surfaced during the strike about the toxic workplace he has allegedly created on The Tonight Show, has seen record-high viewership in recent weeks.
While late-night TV has long stood as a launching pad for up-and-coming entertainers and a place for A-list bona fides to chat up their newest projects, politics has always been a part of the winning formula, too—from Jack Paar interviewing Fidel Castro at the height of the Cold War to Bill Clinton busting out his sax on The Arsenio Hall Show.
In the near-decade since Trump officially announced he was entering the 2016 presidential race, the relationship between late-night television and politics has become even closer—progressing from friends with benefits to cranky old married couple. While the media bandies about phrases like “The SNL Effect” and “The Trump Effect” (there are lots of effects), the real connection between the two worlds comes down to one simple thing: comedy’s ability to transcend political lines and reveal the naked truth.
“A comedian’s job is to read the room,” The Daily Show correspondent Jordan Klepper told The Daily Beast. “So it’s any comedian’s job to see what everybody’s thinking about and find humor in it and find truth in it… When I go out into the field, I have a different perspective: I want to discover and I want to reveal, and I can use humor as a tool—a tool that, oftentimes, straight journalism and networks can’t use.”
“I can call out hypocrisy to its face,” Klepper continued, “and call out bullshit in ways that other places can’t. And hopefully, in using humor, I can reveal something that feels more true than what you might normally get on the five o’clock news.”
While The Daily Show has always devoted the bulk of its running time to sending up the biggest news stories of the day, other late-night shows have discovered that the audience bandwidth for protracted news segments has been increasing as well. This is something Late Night’s Gentile certainly understands.
“What is actually very true of the world, and particularly of our political system right now, is that it can feel as though you’ve run out of words to describe what is happening,” Gentile said of the political dumpster fire that Trump ignited almost a decade ago. “One lodestar for us is to always come back to describing things just as they are in reality; putting our feet on the ground and saying what is true. And in that, there’s catharsis, because there’s a degree to which you can’t even say these things without laughing.”
“Because it’s a comedy show, we’re always trying to make things funny—and sometimes they inherently are because of how absurd they are,” Gentile said. “But there’s definitely a difference between funny and trivial. Things may be funny, but we never want to treat them as trivial.”
While 2023 will be remembered for the silencing of our late-night revolutionaries during a span of time that saw a former president found liable for sexual battery, and that same former president indicted a whopping three times (twice for attempting to overturn the results of America’s presidential election), 2024 might be about having too much to say.
This coming year, America could very realistically have a presidential candidate who is spending his days in a courtroom fighting insurrection charges, and his evenings invigorating his base with bizarre, Village People-backed dance moves. Will late-night TV be ready?
“We’re heading into the burn-it-all-down election,” Klepper said. “They’re setting flames to everything—reproductive rights, democratic norms, impeachments on to-be-determined ideas. So you’ve got to get a flame-retardant suit before going into this arson that is going to be 2024. So within an arson election, you have to be prepped.”
To Klepper, 2024 is exactly the kind of challenge late-night comedy was designed for—though “I think it will really put late-night to quite the test to see just how nimble, thoughtful, and able late-night is to get the ideas across in a way that seems fresh,” he said.
For Gentile and Late Night, chaos is a license to be silly. “We’ve definitely taken big leaps, comedy-wise, that we may not have taken 10 years ago,” he said of “A Closer Look.” “And that’s because there’s a connection there with the audience and they really enjoy how silly it can get. So in 2024, the more chaotic politics becomes, the more chaotic the comedy in our segment becomes, because it kind of has to reflect reality.”
“We definitely let ourselves be freer with our crazier comedic instincts because that’s also what’s happening in the world,” Gentile said. “It’s going to be an unprecedented year.”
For more, listen to Jordan Klepper on The Last Laugh podcast.
