Late Night Comedy Is Serious About Coronavirus Reponse

The summer that never really began is coming to an end. Some students are heading back to school. Baseball is plowing through its abbreviated schedule. Travel bans are being eased. With the political conventions underway, the focus of the news is beginning to shift to the November election.

But where are we with health safety policy? It appears to be all over the map. The Big Ten and Pac 12 have announced the cancellation of their fall football schedules, but other conferences plan to move forward. States are gearing up for more vote by mail, concerned about the safety of in-person voting. Positive COVID-19 test results remain stubbornly high in the U.S. Some schools that have attempted to open normally have pulled back and moved to a hybrid system of some in-person, some virtual learning. 

The White House has left much of the decision-making up to the states and the states have approached the crisis wildly differently. Now the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance benefit and the Paycheck Protection Program have expired, and Congress has yet to pass any legislation replenishing or reconfiguring them. 

How are we supposed to know what to do?

In the midst of all this chaos, I have been looking to an unlikely institution to guide me in getting a sense of what’s safe and what’s not: Late Night Comedy.

Late Night Comedy hosts were all homebound only a month or so ago. Now, slowly, they are venturing back to their studios, but in a cautious and seemingly safe way. None have brought back their audiences yet. Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers have crept back to their studios with barebones, socially distant crews to produce shows that are markedly different in energy, but still vital. 

Other hosts, including John Oliver, Samantha Bee, and, notably Trevor Noah, continue to shelter in place, undoubtedly planning their return to the studio only when its safe.

Since none of the shows have brought back an audience, the decision whether or not to relocate to the studio appears to be largely about preference rather than necessity. All the shows remain intimate, a little amateurish compared to their former selves, and reliant on Zoom interactions with guests that work fine for conversation, but struggle a little with musical guests. 

For some shows, the intimacy has been a feature, not a bug. John Oliver always blasted through his complex scripts with such speed that the audience had trouble keeping up. Now, with no audience to slow him down, Last Week Tonight has retained its place as the smartest show of them all, packing the most information into the shortest time period.

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah has become a delight, no less scathing and insightful than its previous iteration, but now focused more on quirkiness than hipness. Noah’s “slightly nutty guy going crazy in quarantine” character allows him to do silly asides to a second camera. The editing is unexpected and sharp. While the other shows have striven to provide the comfort of the expected, Noah seems to have tossed out the previous structure and restarted from scratch. The result is hilarious.

Samantha Bee’s program may be the safest of all, situating her in an idyllic field, surrounded by chirping birds and forest creatures. Her frenetic pace has slowed just a bit, but her rapier wit is still intact.

Seth Meyers created silly asides with background elements of his home-based sets—at first jokes about copies of the book The Thorn Birds, then a corny back and forth with a cheesy painting of a sea captain. Occasionally, his enthusiastic toddler sons appeared in costume. He even included his parents in a bit. 

The late night comedy shows share one thing in common: respect for science. Because comedy at its root is about skewering hypocrisy and unthinking behavior, the shows seem to feel an obligation to be smart about how they progress back to normality. None of them have yet gone back to the way things were before. And so far, no photos have appeared of broken protocols that have forced them to suspend a staffer the way the high school in Georgia suspended a student whistleblower. 

What does it say about our country that comedians are more trustworthy than the government? We could do worse as a nation than follow their lead to move back slowly and safely. As Meyers says and the end of each show: “Stay safe, wear a mask, we love you.”