CNN’s Jake Tapper sat down with NBC Late Night’s Seth Meyers at the network’s annual Citizen by CNN for a conversation about late night in the Trump era.
“You can basically report the news as a setup to a joke all the time now,” Meyers told Tapper.
Like with a daily cable news program, Meyers says that he and his staff “just try to react and be agile,” throughout the day for a show that tapes at 6:30 p.m. ET each night (the program airs at 12:35 a.m. ET). “It [the news cycle] makes it a very exciting place to work.”
Late Night With Seth Meyers launched in 2014.
“My biggest fear when I first launched the show was ‘will we be able to fill an hour? I’m pretty sure we don’t have that problem,” Meyers quipped.
Late Night With Seth Meyers is at its heart a comedy show about making jokes. However, Meyers says that if the program is going to talk about politics, “we feel like very important to get the language right,” adding, “If you’re gonna make jokes about the news, you have to get the news right, especially now.”
Tapper asked Meyers if NBC has done research on the political bent of his Late Night audience. “I think I can guess, but we don’t get data regarding political party of those who watching our show,” Meyers said, before conceding, “I think at this point, if you were a hard-core Trump supporter, you would only be hate-watching it.”
But what about those right-leaning fans? Has he been afraid of them turning off the program as it continues to lampoon the Trump administration each night?
“Our show became more political, and I don’t think we’re the only ones that did,” said Meyers. “Our political position became pretty clear as far as how we felt about this president; so, if you were someone who had watched the show, maybe to the right politically who was a fan of SNL and was along for the ride, maybe you turned off the show.”
“I respect that choice.”
Meyers added: “Obviously, I want those people to continue to watch our show. So when that happened, I heard it a little bit on Twitter, but I think at this point, people know who I am and don’t have maybe the same expectation of someone like me as they would as people in the news. So I don’t hear it as much.”