Karen Chee’s late-night origin story starts with Johnny Carson. Raised on Tonight Show clips by her Korean grandfather, Chee says she grew up hearing a little Carson in her grandpa’s English-language “affectation,” right down to how he pronounced certain words.
On this week’s episode of LateNighter’s Inside Late Night podcast, Chee tells Mark Malkoff how she later found herself at 30 Rock, joining Late Night with Seth Meyers in 2019—a seminal stop in a career that’s also included writing and co-producing Netflix’s A Man on the Inside, stints on the Golden Globes, and on-air roles on HBO’s High Maintenance and FOX’s The Great North.
Her path to Late Night came together in an unusually low-pressure way. After submitting packets to other shows, Chee met a few Late Night writers at the Golden Globes, who quietly urged the show’s EPs to meet with her—without telling her it was essentially a job interview. “I wasn’t nervous at all ’cause I didn’t know it was a job interview,” she recalls, a detachment that helped her come off more confident than she otherwise would have.
Chee talks about learning the pace of daily comedy writing as a monologue writer, where a good day might mean one to three jokes making air. She says it took about six months to understand what kinds of premises were most likely to survive the process.
The conversation also covers “What Does Karen Know,” the recurring Late Night segment built around Chee’s pop-culture blind spots as a twenty-something millennial. Chee credits writer Matt Goldich with the idea and says she initially assumed it was too internal to work for viewers. The bit, she adds, felt safe largely because of Meyers’ instincts as both a writer and performer—someone she trusted not to make her look foolish even when the segment was largely unscripted.
The episode touches on her earlier internship at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as well (where she remembers Brian Stack going out of his way to learn interns’ names), and the small surrealism of arriving at Late Night and immediately running into John Lutz—a writer there—essentially “Lutz” in the building where 30 Rock was set.
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.
