
As regular viewers of Late Night With Seth Meyers already know, few things seem to bring Seth Meyers more joy than catching NBC cue card legend Wally Feresten in a mistake—and then raking him over the coals for it.
Well, Meyers’ cuppeth ranneth over on Tuesday night’s Late Night when he spied three cue-card mistakes over the course of just two minutes.
“Wally, what do you think went wrong there?,” Meyers asked when the spotted the first error—a missing word in a joke about Taco Bell. “Well, we made a change…,” Feresten responded.
“You made a change. Yeah, we changed the punchline,” Meyers allowed. “But we definitely missed a word.”
Turning to the audience, Meyers said “You guys are seeing how things go when the cue cards are f*cked up.”
The Late Night host then told the joke twice—once with Meyers filling in the missing word, and then again, “the way Wally wrote it.”
Nothing seems to bring Seth Meyers more joy than catching cue card legend Wally Feresten making a mistake—but three in a row? That's gotta be a record. @cuecardwally pic.twitter.com/Wpxe1zxYLr
— LateNighter (@latenightercom) October 9, 2024
Two other cue card flubs soon followed, although to be fair to our colleague Feresten (Disclosure: Wally writes a weekly column for us here at LateNighter), Meyers made up the second for comic effect.
Wrapping up his monologue (or “monolouge,” as it it was misspelled on the card), Meyers told his audience, “We have a great show for you tonight—or I do, anyway. Not all of us are rising to the occasion.”
Meyers, of course, kids out of love. As the cue card department head at both Saturday Night Live and Late Night, Feresten has been holding Meyers’ cards for nearly 25 years.
In a recent LateNighter column, Feresten answered a reader’s question about it feels to be called out for his mistakes on national television. In his response, Feresten wrote that he enjoyed the opportunity to exchange in a back-and-forth with Meyers on camera and marveled at “how cool and relaxed Seth is that he’ll make a joke out of the situation instead of getting annoyed or stopping the show to do a retake.”