Add this to the many quirks of Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney: The show employs a courtroom sketch artist.
Eagle-eyed viewers may have spotted her in the audience sketching Mulaney and his guests during Wednesday night’s premiere.
Her name is Mona Shafer Edwards, and though you may not know her name, you’ve likely seen her work. The Los Angeles-based artist has drawn courtroom sketches for the biggest trials of the last 40 years, with her subjects including Richard Ramirez, O.J. Simpson, the Menendez Brothers, and Michael Jackson.
She wasn’t introduced to viewers at home Wednesday night, nor to members of Mulaney’s studio audience—some of whom puzzled over why there was a woman in the front row sketching away through the hour-long show with two pads and a collection of colored pens. Her name did, however, appear in the show’s end credits.
It wasn’t immediately clear what Everybody’s Live intends to do with Edwards’ sketches. The classic use case for a courtroom sketch artist is to capture the proceedings of a trial when cameras cannot, making her presence all the more incongruous in the context of a television show that’s being streamed worldwide in real time.
That the show would bring in not just a courtroom sketch artist, but L.A.’s preeminent courtroom sketch artist to perform the task without mention is certainly in keeping with the off-kilter vibe of Everybody’s Live. It is, after all, a show that seems to like to keep its audience guessing.
In a 2015 Los Angeles Times profile, Edwards described her process, which she said begins with studying her subject for defining characteristics, paying particular attention to body language, with the goal of capturing “the humanity in the room with a human’s touch.”
Edwards appeared to draw two sketches over the course of the hour-long show: one of Mulaney delivering his monologue, and another of the host in conversation with his four guests. At the show’s conclusion, a staffer was seen whisking her backstage.
If we had to guess, we’d say this isn’t likely to be the last time we see Edwards on the show. Stay tuned…
Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney returns next Wednesday, March 19, at 10 PM ET/7 PM PT.
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