Though she was a veteran of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Ziwe, and the cult hits Joe Pera Talks with You and The Chris Gethard Show, Jo Firestone didn’t think she was the obvious choice to head-write After Midnight. She joked in her interview that she wasn’t “very online” and even froze when asked to riff. But soon she was managing a flood of more than 1,600 writing packets—while Stephen Colbert himself read through submissions and weighed in on potential hires.
This week on LateNighter’s Inside Late Night podcast, Firestone tells Mark Malkoff that every episode felt like a test. The show’s structure was constantly evolving, but what never changed was the thrill of letting comedians loose. The show’s writers worked with contestants on their jokes—but the moments that landed hardest were improvised: Sasheer Zamata spinning a riff, Lisa Gilroy thriving under pressure, Kurt Braunohler calling his daughter on-air to announce that he’d lost.
For Firestone, steering the ship came with pressure. The hours were kinder than most late-night jobs, but the responsibility wasn’t. “You get hired to take on the stress of other people and have people get mad at you. And that is, like, that’s the whole job,” she says. The team even kept a phone tree—set up during LA wildfires—to quickly spread news across departments. It was that system that alerted staff when Taylor Tomlinson’s exit meant the show’s end.
Firestone also discusses her recent return to The Tonight Show, where she was back on camera reporting a field piece, along with her projects outside of late night, from teaching a weekly comedy class for seniors to having her novel Murder on Sex Island go from a self-published joke to release with a major publisher.
Click the embed at the top of this post to watch now, or find Inside Late Night on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
