It’s rare for a late-night show to instantly find its voice. Even the longest-running successes of the genre haven’t burst out of the gate fully-formed.
The version of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show that lives in pop culture lore is primarily the show’s ’70s era—the period following Carson’s decision to uproot himself to Los Angeles. Conan O’Brien’s penchant for the absurd was present from his self-deprecating opening sequence to Late Night in 1993, but the balance of old-fashioned entertainment and post-modernist anarchy didn’t get smoothed out for a few years—and only got funnier once O’Brien was flying solo. For Seth Meyers, who inherited NBC’s 12:37 a.m. time slot in 2014, his iteration of Late Night has only strengthened following the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of the most enduring segments that began at the tail end of the audience-free era, “Surprise Inspection,” recently celebrated its third anniversary. Along the way, it has stealthily become a microcosm of why Meyers’ whole show has been appointment TV for a while.
The premise of “Surprise Inspection” hasn’t changed since it began in October 2021, though the initial framing—that audiences were finally about to return—quickly got discarded once that warning became a reality.
Meyers begins each segment with a setup that explains to the audience that “each night, my writers write hundreds of monologue jokes. And honestly, a lot of the jokes, we have to discard them, because… they’re just not that good.” He’ll note that some of the jokes are baffling, some are offensive, and some just aren’t funny.
The idea of each “Surprise Inspection” is for Meyers to give some of these jokes new life as part of what ends up feeling like a perverse second monologue. Sometimes a joke or two will hit; one time, he slyly noted that a clunker about the Netflix show Wednesday at least “had some craft!” But often, the jokes are met with either groans or dead silence.
Just as some of Johnny Carson’s best monologue moments came when he would riff on a gag gone sour, the same is true for Meyers, with an added bonus. By making “Surprise Inspection” a recurring segment on the same level as “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” or his stalwart “A Closer Look,” Meyers has allowed his writers to join him in the spotlight, not just walking us through the methods of joke-writing but making it easier to identify the types of jokes certain writers are fond of and thus their unique styles.
Matt Goldich, for example, seems to enjoy unexpected pop culture references; one of his best and strangest jokes starts with a setup about using both arms to get both a COVID and flu shot and ends with a dig at the one-armed man who killed Dr. Richard Kimble’s wife in the 1993 film The Fugitive. (He’s got another one that references the long-running will-they-won’t-they romance on Frasier between Niles Crane and Daphne Moon that is both funny and so hyper-specific that it’s guaranteed to flop for a larger audience.)
Ian Morgan, whose staff photo with an awkward smile is always a source of playful teasing for Meyers, and his “best friend on staff” Bryan Donaldson each have a penchant for dad jokes. (Although in one case, Meyers declared “that’s not even a dad joke, that’s a deadbeat dad joke.”)
Then there’s Mike Scollins, who Meyers always introduces via a photo of him on the set of the show wearing a tank top and often by quickly noting that he’s “a bad guy.” Scollins’ jokes are almost always the most identifiable, because they’re the most boundary-pushing and offensively hilarious.
“He has no middle ground,” Meyers says in giving context to the audience about Scollins, as a “really good joke writer” who also comes up with “shocking garbage.” (In June, Luke Wilson shared that he’s a fan of the segment, and “this Scollins character” in particular.)
In an April edition of the segment—where Scollins is glimpsed near the audience risers—Meyers notes that when he chose to sift through a longer stretch of his discarded one-liners for the segment and chose to exclude some, Scollins dubbed him a “coward.” So Meyers launched into what he dubbed an “Oops All Scollins” bit, then proceeded to run through gags making fun of the Trump family and Casey Anthony, a dog killing a mailman, Bill Cosby, and Michael Vick’s dark history with dog-fighting rings.
For fans of comedy writing, “Surprise Inspection” is a fascinating study of what does and doesn’t make a joke work. In this segment, for example, Meyers delivers the following joke: “Authorities in Florida arrested a pastor this week after he allegedly masturbated at a Starbucks. Fortunately, they stopped him before he could make any sermon.”
The joke is enough of a groan-worthy pun, but the way in which Meyers casually, briefly, but effectively explains the “litany of reasons” why it doesn’t work is both very funny and borderline educational for anyone looking to break into the business. That Meyers later breaks down laughing at the phrase “make any sermon,” and offhandedly retorts, “It’s like they’re writing using Google Translate,” speaks as much to his comfort ad-libbing as to his own knowledge as a comedy writer, including on Late Night and Saturday Night Live, about what makes these punchy jokes work best.
Especially since Donald Trump became president in 2016, Meyers has been best known for the aforementioned “A Closer Look” segment, which blends savage jokes courtesy of writer Sal Gentile along with Meyers’ own dry delivery, his bewildered reactions to the state of American politics, and a heaping helping of clips.
Within these recurring segments, the show shines by making its staff as rich an ensemble as possible, in an hourly medium that’s often driven by the host and their guests. The web exclusive “Corrections” has been a cult favorite for the truest fans, but Tuesday night episodes are ceded over to Meyers’ deep bench of writers.
It would be easy for “Surprise Inspection” to feel like an insult, as if the head of a snake is eating itself out of disgust. But Meyers and head writer Alex Baze are clearly doing this as a way to let the audience know that the entire show is a truly collaborative effort despite the one namethat appears in its title.
It’s not just that some of the writers have appeared on the show, in Amber Ruffin’s case, have hosted their own late-night show. “Surprise Inspection” is the kind of thing a late-night show can only do when it’s found its voice.
NBC’s Late Night franchise has always been a wonderfully eclectic affair, no matter who hosts. But with Meyers at the helm, it effectively makes its self-awareness the key note of the whole show. And nowhere is the self-awareness of late-night humor more effective than in “Surprise Inspection.”
