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It’s rare that I discuss the late-night episode as a discrete unit. Late night is basically YouTube now, and mostly only old heads (and people watching TV in hotels) experience segments in context/conversation with each other. But Monday’s Daily Show really had something going for it as a cohesive chunk of TV. Something about Jon Stewart’s weekly rant going into a rare guest spot from Emmy-nominated Jessica Williams to an earnest discussion of how to be Jewish while opposing the Netanyahu regime in Israel with Peter Beinart layered together like a beautiful tiramisu.
Stewart’s comedic persona of Old White Blowhard Doing His Best informed the discussion with Beinart, where both men expressed an honest — dare I say, brave? — vulnerability about not having all the answers yet while needing to speak out about the atrocities they are seeing out of Gaza. Stewart already positioned himself as fallible, which made his earnestness more endearing. It’s like when Polonius dies in Hamlet. The dumb makes it more sad. So that was the best episode of late night this week. But below, the best moments:
Desi Lydic is a really charming interviewer for entertainment bits. She was great with Alison Brie and Dave Franco on Wednesday, but a day before her chemistry with Jenny Slate was on fire. Slate and Lydic talked about Dying for Sex in a way that makes it seem like not the tear-jerkiest tear-jerker to ever jerk tears, and that is a triumph in itself. But then when Slate got to list her very esoteric bucket list, the segment soared.
Earlier in the week, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang pitched a podcast for Stephen Colbert and his wife, Evie, to do once The Late Show is dunzo: They go on dates and rate the experience. I’d listen! And this mail-bag seg proved the two remember everything about their early dating life. Love, love, love hearing details like the first movie they ever saw together was Backdraft. The kind of detail entire improv scenes are built on. The easy chemistry between Colbert and McGee should be a podcast, a parasocial tincture the Colbert nation can slurp weekly.
Comedian Drew Dunn is really innovating in the zone of robo-voice imitation. I’ve never heard a Siri-adjacent voice impression so accurate. I think it’s because he speaks on the inhale? It sounded so non-carbon-based I thought for a second that he was lip-syncing. Late night is still the place where burgeoning comedians can find a new audience, and we need to keep that space available.
I feel like I say it a lot, but I need to say it even more: Seth Meyers is the best banterer on late night. Meyers does something the other girlies either can’t or won’t — match his guest’s freak. He’s “Yes, and”-ing like a true improviser. If a guest is taciturn, he draws them out. If they’re a friend, he’ll welcome the audience into a preestablished circle of trust. And with this Sandra Oh spot, he plays a wonderfully Shakespearian fool (callback to the intro) to Oh’s knowing actor. First he asks Oh what the hardest speech she’s ever memorized is. Then after she acquits herself beautifully, he says the speech back to her in a way I can only describe as “dog-shittily.” Then he asks her what it meant in the first place. It’s the essence of chat comedy.
And then you have the pure chaos of WWHL, where the L (Live) is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Wednesday’s show saw Isaac Mizrahi and RHOM’s Julia Lemigova discuss their brushes (and snogs) with accused sexual predator Kevin Spacey. “I was so young, Andy,” Mizrahi says. “But I looked younger.” They also discussed who has or hasn’t kissed host Andy Cohen. It had all the energy of a dinner party, where people want to get involved with the topic of convo regardless of whether or not it’ll look good in the harsh light of day. Everyone has an anecdote, and everyone will be heard. This is one of those late-night moments you could easily see staged in a movie, in order to show how the character’s life has gone completely out of control. Or clipped out in a true-crime doc. Either way, you’re watching.