Comedian and writer Aparna Nancherla has quietly built one of the most interesting late-night résumés in comedy. After beginning her TV writing career on FX’s Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, she went on to write for Late Night with Seth Meyers, and more recently became a recurring favorite on After Midnight with Taylor Tomlinson.
This week on LateNighter’s Inside Late Night podcast, Nancherla tells Mark Malkoff about how her default setting is “pretty anxious,” and how that dialed up when she joined Late Night with Seth Meyers midseason, coming in without a cohort of fellow new writers. She’d already had a similar experience at Totally Biased, joining that room midseason as well and feeling like everyone else “knew what they were doing” while she was still figuring it out.
Her Totally Biased years also overlapped with one of the more infamous Chris Rock standup stories. Nancherla was hosting a new-material night at UCB when Rock dropped in, spotted audience members filming, politely asked them to stop, and then walked off when phones kept coming out. From her perspective onstage, it was a nightmare scenario—but she says the crowd ultimately treated it like a wild “you had to be there” moment and bonded over seeing it happen live.
Malkoff and Nancherla dig into her own standup trajectory too. Her first late-night standup spot was on Conan, booked by JP Buck after she did Just for Laughs in Montreal. Later came sets for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—taped showcase-style without Colbert in the room—and The Late Late Show with James Corden, where she still remembers hearing Corden laugh during her set. She also popped up on HBO’s Crashing as a New York standup character that felt just a shade removed from her real life.
Nancherla talks about what she learned from Seth Meyers as a boss who came up as both a performer and a head writer. She credits him with understanding writers in a way some late-night hosts don’t, creating a more intimate, welcoming room where the staff feels genuinely seen. One of her favorite memories from her relatively short tenure was getting a sketch about a “fireman’s calendar for the crew” produced and shot.
The conversation also covers her first full-length comedy special, Hopeful Potato, which premieres on Dropout December 15. The hour is the culmination of material she developed after stepping away from standup for nearly three years while writing her 2023 book Unreliable Narrator, an essay collection about self-doubt and anxiety. Coming back, she built the hour through longer “workout” shows rather than just 10–15 minute sets around town—and learned to give herself permission to mess around onstage in front of an audience.
Fans who connect with Unreliable Narrator and her onstage honesty about anxiety will sometimes approach her after shows, but she says her audience tends to be as shy as she is. Many simply offer a quick compliment and then flee, or smile from a distance. For Nancherla, that’s the ideal: a room full of hopeful potatoes, quietly grateful to have found each other.
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.
