Every performer lives for the big moments: the long soliloquy, the tightrope walk, opening night, overtime, the pennant stretch.
For anyone working in late-night television, the big moment is here: The pennant stretch of a roller-coaster, nail-biter of a presidential campaign starts for real tonight with the most anticipated, hyped, exhaustively pre-analyzed television event in recent human memory–the first (and perhaps only) debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
If a late-night show can’t get its juices bubbling now, it is probably in the wrong business.
Fortunately, the bubbling is apparent everywhere. After several months of on-again, off-again scheduling of original editions of the late-night shows, thanks to summer vacations and weeks filled with running and jumping athletes and Marie Antoinette impressionists in Paris, all of the big horses are back in the gate and ready to run as of Monday night.
Tonight, two shows, The Daily Show on Comedy Central and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS, will be producing live shows. Both will be on after the debate, essentially adding the comic spin to the pro-forma spin of the separate campaigns, and the panels of palavering pundits on the cable news channels.
Will the comedy commentary on late night be more effective in capturing the essential moments in the debate than the “instant polls” on “who won,” and the panels of allegedly uncommitted viewers offering insight more turgid than trenchant? History says yes.
Almost nothing said in any debate analysis has ever had the gut-punch impact of the debate sketches performed by Saturday Night Live. (Millions of people still think George W. Bush summed up his policies in one word: “Strategery,” and that Sarah Palin really said she could see Russia from her house.)
But SNL remains off the air until later this month and so will miss the chance to add to its long roster of memorable debate skewerings. It will, however, be back—starting September 28—in time to get some licks in on the Vice Presidential debate, scheduled for Oct 1.
And in what certainly looks like a move to offer the next-best thing to an SNL debate sketch, Seth Meyers will be hosting a special one-hour prime-time presidential debate edition of his “A Closer Look” segment on NBC at 10 pm Wednesday.
That ought to ring some memory bells for late-night TV fans. The staff of SNL put out a series of prime-time specials to comment on a previous election campaign, the presidential race of 2008.
That year, labeled as prime-time “Weekend Update” editions, the first two of these specials, opened with sketches devoted to the second and third debates between Barack Obama and John McCain. Coincidentally (or perhaps not) the “Weekend Update” section of the special was co-anchored by Amy Poehler and…Seth Meyers.
Will SNL have any presence on Wednesday night’s “Closer Look” special? That’s not anything that’s been announced, but maybe someone is checking Maya Rudolph’s travel schedule, because why not re-introduce her Kamala in prime time?
The meaningful point is that this debate is so important to this election season that a show with an SNL alum as star, produced by the SNL impresario Lorne Michaels, is diving into prime time again to mark the occasion.
And Jimmy Kimmel is finally back; and Jon Stewart is changing his schedule to anchor The Daily Show‘s coverage after the debate. And everybody is trying to book Tim Walz as a guest. The games are on.
As they should be. Over the entire course of Donald Trump’s political career, he has been at the center of more unintentionally comic statements and ideas than any previous public figure, everything from redrawn hurricane maps to the conundrum of the shark and the submerged boat battery.
Late-night monologue jokes about Trump could exhaust the bandwidth of the cloud. And many of the jokes literally write themselves. The comic Sarah Cooper has made a career out of simply lip-syncing Trump’s actual words.
Almost every late-night host now does some form of a Trump impression (not Kimmel, and Stewart acknowledges his is not his best work.)
SNL has probably had more Trump impersonators than any other person the show has satirized in its 50-year history (Phil Hartman, Darrell Hammond, Jason Sudekis, Taram Killam, Alec Baldwin and James Austin Johnson. And let us not forget Leslie Jones.)
The shows are counting on Trump to give them fresh material, enough to open their shows on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and most other nights for the next two months.
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