When college professor Steve Ross began teaching psychology 16 years ago, he never imagined he’d one day be drawing on his love of late-night television in the classroom. But as it turns out, playing a late-night host has become one of his best tools for getting through to students.
Over the past few years, the professor and a small team at Mid Michigan College in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, have turned select classroom topics into surprisingly spot-on parodies of Last Week Tonight.
Titled Pass Psych Tonight, his videos see Ross doing his best John Oliver as he leads students through detailed deep-dives on memory, correlation, and the brain—complete with a matching backdrop, tons of graphics, and yes, loads of jokes.
“Many believe our prefrontal cortex matures by around 25 or 26,” Ross says in one of the videos.”The message here is: Once you’re thinking like an adult with a truly mature brain, Leonardo DiCaprio will not date you,”
“Perhaps we’re being hard on him,” he continues. “He might just be really turned on by immature prefrontal cortexes. It’s possible he’d likely be just as happy with an 85-year-old with a prefrontal lesion, or with most American football players.”
Like Oliver, Ross has also incorporated stunts and recurring jokes into Pass Psych Tonight—like enlisting The Office’s Brian Baumgartner to present a short-term memory test, and Ross’ running appreciation for his local Ponderosa Steakhouse.
Though he grew up an avid Conan O’Brien fan, and counts Oliver, Jon Stewart, and Jordan Klepper among his favorite current late night hosts, Ross says the videos weren’t inspired by his love for the genre or a secret dream of hosting his own show. “Honestly, it all happened unexpectedly and organically,” Ross tells LateNighter.
The project grew out of a series of weekly video announcements the professor had been making for his online courses with the help of the college’s multimedia coordinator, Noah Lueke. Lueke would surprise Ross by inserting various backdrops into the videos.
For one semester’s finale video, Ross requested a backdrop of fireworks like one might see during a grandiose John Oliver finale. But Lueke went one step further, placing Ross into a virtual replica of Oliver’s studio.
That “became the catalyst for Pass Psych Tonight,” Ross says. “I began reflecting on how I got my news back in college, and even today.” For Ross, it was shows like The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight. “They’re funny, but they’re also doing great journalism and educating the public,” he explains. “I believe most of us enjoy our content with an added dose of humor.”
Ross theorized that injecting some funny could boost engagement in his classroom, helping him reach students who might otherwise find themselves tuning out of the material. “This became an exercise in using a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down,” he says.
Of course, mimicking a top-level late-night show can be a difficult task on a shoestring budget, so Ross assembled a crack team of colleagues to make it all happen. The professor is quick to praise the impressively small team that helps him turn out every episode.
“Unfortunately for us, HBO has millions of dollars,” says Lueke, who continues to lead the production of the endeavor. “And we have a camera, whatever skills we can combine, and an Adobe subscription.”
Even so, Lueke set out to make the best replica possible. “We’re just trying to make something interesting and fun for students, but we’re creating a parody of something that everybody knows and already loves,” he says. “The way I saw it, we only pull this off if they can’t tell the difference between watching this and the original.” The closer the two shows matched, he figured, the more students could focus on the educational content rather than the faux show’s flaws.
In addition to lighting, camera, teleprompter, editing, and graphic design work, Lueke’s long list of contributions includes a custom frame-by-frame remake of Last Week Tonight’s opening sequence:
Ross pens an initial draft of each episode, then passes his scripts off to co-writer Tyler Wertsch for a “comedic punch-up.”
“To paraphrase Tim Minchin, I think Steve and I are funny for academics and academic for funny people,” Wertsch says. “It’s a lot of fun to try and make things that exist in that narrow Venn diagram overlap.”
From there, Ross has his scripts vetted by psychologist Katie Flannery and Mid Michigan’s instructional designer Kaitlyn Hawald for maximum clarity.
One more person Ross brought in? An actual Last Week Tonight staffer. Ross tracked down the HBO show’s announcer, David Kaye, to provide voiceover for Pass Psych Tonight’s own “And Now This” segments.
Ross uses Pass Psych Tonight to complement his usual lesson plans, with the videos serving as introductory primers or as a post-lesson review tool. And just like the big-time late-night shows, he also adjusts the format to meet his audience where they are.
“I’ve also broken the videos into shorter clips, recognizing that students’ attention spans may not hold for 30- or 40-minute lectures, and I’m experimenting with different ways to integrate these shorter segments into my teaching,” Ross explains.
So far, the Pass Psych Tonight team’s approach seems to be working. Students respond enthusiastically, engagement and retention has improved, and they’re even sharing the content with others outside class.
Ross says they’ve also proven particularly useful for his web courses. “A real struggle of mine,” he says, “has been developing meaningful connections with online students.” But with Pass Psych Tonight, the amount of positive messages from students grew exponentially. “I’ve never felt as connected to students in my 15+ years of teaching.”
Co-writer Wertsch echoes the value of connecting with students in a new way. “The more academics like us can shift the nature of teaching to meet students, the better,” says Wertsch. “It’s one of the longstanding arrogances of college and university circles that students need to meet professors’ standards, rather than us trying to connect with our students.”
Those who aren’t taking classes with Ross have caught on, too, with his YouTube views far exceeding the number of students enrolled in his courses.
Earlier this year, Ross presented Pass Psych Tonight at a psychology conference, where it caught the eye of Macmillan Learning. Ross, Lueke, and Wertsch were hired to create more late-night-inspired videos for Macmillan’s learning platform. Dubbed Late Night Lectures, these shorter videos evoke a more general concept of a late-night show, rather than the show-specific parody of Pass Psych Tonight
Ross is now considering bringing that less specific parody to his regular Pass Psych Tonight videos. Whichever way he takes it, his hopes for these late-night/learning hybrids remain the same.
“I want these videos to create a climate in classrooms that encourages creativity, humor, and learning at the same time. In the end, I think that is another lesson I am teaching students,” he explains. “They may not remember all the concepts, but if I can show them you can be creative, passionate, and fun with something like basic psychology, it encourages them to do it with whatever they want.”
Complete episodes of Pass Psych Tonight with Professor Steve Ross can be viewed on the show’s YouTube Channel.
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I like to use humor when I teach. It’s effective.