Seth Meyers knows his show is likely to change based on the results of the presidential race. But with the election just days away, the comedian, Saturday Night Live alum and host of NBC’s Late Night is doing his best to stay in the present and take each new insane development as it comes.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Meyers talks about how he ended up releasing a stand-up special (Dad Man Walking on Max) that has nothing to do with politics so close to the election and goes deep on where his head is at on the stakes of Trump vs. Harris right now. The comedian also shares thoughts about his infamous ice cream date with Joe Biden, why he regrets platforming JD Vance on his show, how SNL’s reliance on guest stars has changed the show since he was in the cast, and so much more.
Meyers was “very on the fence” about making the title of his new special a corny pun given that there are no traditionally “dad jokes” actually in the material he delivers from the stage. “I was very hesitant to put dad or father in the title,” he adds, but his director, fellow comedian Neal Brennan, made the point that would amount to “false advertising” without it.
“It’s nice to depart from what we do every night at this show,” Meyers says from the makeshift podcast studio his team constructed backstage at 30 Rockefeller Center. “And talking about my family puts me in a lot better mood than talking about politics.”
Dad Man Walking is premiering at a time when all anyone—including Meyers—can really think about is the election, while at the same time desperately searching for any sort of distraction to ease the anxiety that comes with such a tight race. When HBO suggested releasing it in the last week of October, Meyers admits he didn’t quite think through where the cultural mood in the country would be.
Meyers actually taped the special back in June, a full month before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and passed the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris. There was initially one Trump joke in the hour, but Brennan convinced him to take it out. His hope is that even his politically minded comedy fans are eager for a break.
“And if you are interested in my take on politics, fortunately there is a very nice avenue for you to get that,” he says, referring to his day job as a late-night host. “But Dad Man Walking is not that.”
Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing by following The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
How are you feeling in this final stretch before Election Day? I mean, you’re so in the news on a daily basis. How do you process it? Because I think it can get to be such a deluge of stuff that it’s hard to really take a step back and think about where we are.
It weirdly is. The nice thing is, the position we’ve put ourselves in with the show is we’ll just react to what happens. We’re never going to try to plan “A Closer Look” three days ahead of time, because we’ve learned, certainly more in the last eight years than ever before, that it just all changes too fast. Emotionally, as a human being, I feel a great amount of unease, but I certainly don’t feel like I’m alone there, either.
You seemed to hit a kind of comedic breaking point with Arnold Palmer’s penis. That felt genuine, your reaction to that, how unnerved you were by the whole thing.
Yeah, it was genuine. I do try to unplug on the weekend. I do take that time to be with my kids. And then people are walking up to me, being like, ‘Arnold Palmer dick, gonna be a fun show!’ And I’m like, what is going on? I mean, shame on me for not immediately saying, ‘Oh, Trump just told a story about Arnold Palmer’s dick,’ but it’s just crazy words that no one ever would have approached you with on a nice fall weekend, and yet here we are. I think there’s this expectation of how psyched I must be when I hear him talking about Arnold’s Palmer’s dick. But it is not, it’s the opposite. I’d be psyched if it was disqualifying, which it should be. But it’s just so gutting that half of us are like, can you believe that? And the other half are like, of course you don’t like it. What is the standard? When did you guys move the goalposts? Yeah, we don’t like it.
It made me think of that question that you have gotten many times over the years now, which is, “Doesn’t part of you kind of like that Trump is the president. Don’t you kind of want him to win because it gives you more material?”
I can only tell you, the tension that left my body when Biden officially won was palpable. And the slow creep of that tension back into my bones has not been enjoyable. Because again, this one would be worse. And the fact that it’s so close is bad.
Trump’s political arc so closely mirrors this decade of you hosting Late Night. And even going back before that to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where you coincided with him. So there is this path that you’re on with him, where he has been an oddly large part of your late-night and comedy career. Do you feel that?
Yeah. And by the way, I think we should be talking about him. It’s not a crutch for me. It’s the guy who has either had or been runner-up to the most powerful position in the world. So I’m never like, what is it about him that I just can’t quit? I know what it is. And yet, I really can’t stress enough—and again, I’m assuming he’s a big fan of this podcast—but if he went away, I wouldn’t even reference him. He would be retired from the show the day he decides to get out of this.
Yeah, I like how Stephen Colbert stopped saying Trump’s name after Biden won, as if that meant that he was going to stop talking about him, but that obviously didn’t happen.
It was a very novel idea, but the world chose not to agree with its premise.
Yeah, it was hopeful. Maybe he was like, if I don’t say his name he will go away.
I will never negatively judge someone making a hopeful choice.
I do always love when the hosts of these shows become part of the joke or part of the news. And that moment when you were standing next to him and you were both holding ice cream, and then all of a sudden, he’s getting this really hard question on Gaza—I’m sure it wasn’t funny for you in the moment, but you were able to make it pretty funny pretty quickly. What was going through your head when that was happening?
What was really funny was, I was aware of it, I was clocking what was happening, and I sort of thought I had managed to get out of the shot. What was really funny was just moments after it, getting a text from John Oliver with the screengrab from CNN. You know, lower third, “Biden Fields Questions About Gaza,” both of us holding ice cream cones, and Oliver just being like “This is the greatest thing ever, I’m never going to delete this picture.”
Someone, I saw, just recently resurfaced your 2017 interview with JD Vance. What are your memories of that?
I do have memories of it. It was this moment where, after the Trump victory, let’s have conservative voices on who will sort of speak to this demographic that those of us who live in New York City have overlooked and missed. And I think that’s why people were so eager to read his book. And more often than not they’ve just disappointed you. And so, if anything, JD Vance failed to show me the value of having somebody like him on. Because you realize he’s just an opportunist. There would probably be more value in trying to find somebody who’s actually boots on the ground in the part of the world that he grew up in, and can maybe speak a lot more effectively. Other than a guy who obviously did very well for himself and sold a lot of books. I don’t love looking back and realizing I helped him do that.
And you didn’t see him at the time as a potential vice president?
I didn’t. You know, look, I take it very seriously, the idea of being a host and being polite. And the first half of [Hillbilly Elegy], I will say, I didn’t quite take the same message from it that maybe he did. Because I do think his grandmother is a fantastic character, and if it was a book of fiction, you would be impressed by her creation. And so it was not confrontational, my memory was being polite backstage, and it was a fine interview. And then, in a weird way, it reflects the kind of opportunist that he was that he wasn’t going to show us who he really was. Or maybe he didn’t even know who he was about to be, because the winds weren’t blowing that way yet. When he was on our show, I think there was this real idea that there was going to maybe be this new conservative movement that was not reliant on Trump, and obviously that has failed to materialize.
You said you don’t plan ahead in terms of what you’re going to talk about on a nightly basis. But do you have plans for Election Night in the works?
We’re not going to go live. I don’t think we’re going to know much that night. One thing we recently did, which we enjoyed a great deal, is a live, primetime “Closer Look” about the debate. But we did it the next day, and for us, having 24 hours to both do “A Closer Look” about the debate and the reaction to the debate was thrilling. So going live was great. Going live moments after the dust settles, or while it’s settling, that is a skill other shows have shown they’re very adept at. But we have not historically found that we’ve landed that plane in a way that was worth it.
I can’t imagine this year that we are going to know the result that night anyway.
I don’t think we are. But I mean, if Trump wins New York, or Kamala wins Florida, then it would be like, oh, we can go to bed.
That would be very surprising! Have you thought about how the show will change at all depending on who wins?
No, I mean, I think the show will be fine either way. And I think if I spend too much time living in planning for two different futures, it will just take a lot out of me. And you know myself, [head writer] Alex Baze, Sal Gentile, we’re all improvisers. We came from an improv background, and then we learned how to write. And so I think what we like the most is “yes and-ing” the present. And so we are just trying to stay on our toes, and knowing that whether we’re happy or sad, it’s better to have the show than not. So it will be cathartic either way to be doing a show on Election day. And the day after, and the day after, and the day after.
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
