Photo: Jimmy Kimmel Live via YouTube
John Lithgow wrote a poem for Stephen Colbert this week. That’s a little too hagiographic, even for this finale era of The Late Show. It does seem like Colbert isn’t entirely comfortable with the fawning he receives — either from guests or the “Stephen! Stephen!” chanting audience. Watching guest after guest, I’ve come to understand that this farewell to Colbert is a chance for deeply famous people to fangirl out a bit, something they so rarely get to do. People come up to them all the time and say stuff like “Orange County helped heal my relationship with my hometown!,” and they just have to stand there and smile about it. Now they are doing the same thing to Colbert, and Colbert endures it the exact same way. The difference is, when a rando freaks out at Lithgow, it’s not televised.
There was actually a lot of audience tension this week in late night. Two of these audience interactions made it to the top five, but I want to highlight two others: On Have I Got News for You, Gianmarco Soresi did some inadvertent crowdwork by remarking on how much less enthusiastic the audience was for his joke about America being Israel’s pawn in the Middle East than the one about the Iran war being a distraction from the Epstein files. “Oh, less applause for that one I noticed,” he said. And when Conan O’Brien appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to talk Oscars, he reacted with anxiety to the chanting of his name: “You sound like an angry jury, so just settle down.” The audiences are getting more out of this than the celebrity. Except maybe in the case of No. 3 on the list below.
I have a conceptual-artist friend (sorry) who used to collect toasts. The rhyming kind people don’t really fuck with anymore. I should send her this Tonight Show bit, because it’s nothing but these soft-rhyming odes to things as banal as winter boots and the Shamrock Shake. But what cements the bit on this list is Jimmy Fallon and Steve Higgins’s commitment to what they think a posh British accent is. They are so pleased with their aristo voices, and I am pleased for them. Absolutely spiffing, what ho.
You’ve got to love a sitting-down stand-up moment on late night — when a comedian takes prepared stand-up material and pretends they’re saying it off the cuff to their pal Stephen Colbert. Pete Holmes brought an anecdote about getting hit in the balls by a kid (and exacting his dark revenge) to The Late Show, and it was like getting into a warm joke bath. I feel taken care of by these twin institutions of stand-up and late night. Everyone was doing their job and doing it well. It’s competency porn, like the first half of Aliens when it’s just space marine high jinks and no xenomorphs.
I did not feel taken care of when Rebecca Ferguson guested on Late Night With Seth Meyers. She was a liability the whole time, and it rocked. Ferguson tried to get a big applause break going twice, and Meyers shut it down both times. She also hid a spoon in Meyers’s desk before they started filming for reasons I will not spoil. All in all, the interview had the energy of when a bird gets into a grocery store. Like, it’s technically not a problem, at least not yet, but we’re not sure what’s going to happen next. A great energy for late night.
Jennifer Tilly is blessed with an abundance of lore. Her Simpsons money, her professional gambling career, that one house she owns but doesn’t visit much “because there’s a ghost there and he really doesn’t like us being there. I can’t blame him.” WWHL made a game of all the wild shit that has befallen Tilly over the years, including when she did a revival of The Women with Jennifer Coolidge. (The whole thing is on YouTube, and I highly recommend it.) The game was fast, and she only had seconds per round to tell a story about the famous person (or ghost) she has met, and it was wild seeing her try to cram in full anecdotes. Love when therapy has a speed round.
As the SAG Awards (I’m going to keep dead-naming them like Twitter) proved last week, Harrison Ford is a national treasure. And he’s been an adorable standoffish late-night guest since at least David Letterman’s day. Ford put in a bravura performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week, starting the night by shouting at the audience to “knock it off!” when they kept on applauding. Ford and Kimmel wasted no time in razzing their mutual friend Woody Harrelson and denigrating Kimmel when compared to Michael J. Fox. Ford even copped to getting down to his own movie soundtracks. It was probably in jest, but also, it was probably a John Williams joint.