Seth Meyers is seen nightly hosting NBC’s “Late Night” and heard weekly through his two podcasts, but as the comedian and writer is quick to point out, the bulk of his time is spent being a father and a husband. Which is why, for his second-ever stand-up special “Dad Man Walking,” he largely ditched the sharp political material that is a staple of “Late Night” in favor of material about his wife and three kids.
“I do a late night talk show, and then the rest of my life is being a husband and a father, and I really love it, but that’s where all my material comes from,” Meyers told TheWrap of his special, which premieres on HBO (his first for the network) on Saturday. “I think there’s that thing, before you have a wife and children, you’re like, ‘I don’t know why people write jokes about that,’ and then you have it, and you’re like, ‘Oh, because it’s the entirety of your existence.’”
The special finds Meyers lovingly but cuttingly discussing his home life, from things he “hates” about his kids (“I hate how much they talk about lava”) to fights with his wife to things that annoy him about his in-laws. But the former “SNL” head writer flaunts his penchant for wordplay and carefully plotted structure to result in a special that is tight and full of callbacks. This was by design, but not an easy task — especially coming off of his first special “Lobby Baby,” which was structured around the birth of his second son in the lobby of his apartment building.
“I really have this deep appreciation for the fact that I have an audience that’s listening. Because callbacks only work if you have people who are paying attention to your choice of language and the way you select words,” he explained. “So often, that’s how it pays off. There’s like a trigger in their ear that tells them, ‘Oh, right, that’s from then,’ and they appreciate the craft.”
Meyers also had two friends and frequent collaborators at his side to perfect the set – “Late Night” executive producer Mike Shoemaker served as EP on “Dad Man Walking” while comedian Neal Brennan directed the special. Brennan, Meyers said, gave him the “straight talk” that made the special better – including advice on Meyers’ preferred title.
“My favorite thing is I had a different title, and Neal said, ‘That is a catastrophic choice,’ which is a really fun thing to say to a friend,” Meyers said before revealing the title he pitched was “White Man,” a reference to a joke in the special about Meyers and his blonde-headed sons announcing the crosswalk light-change while walking in New York City.
Read on for our full conversation with Meyers about putting the special together, jokes that were cut and how stressed he is that “The Lonely Island with Seth Meyers” podcast has now caught up and is recording week-to-week.
Quite literally, how do you find the time to put together a full stand-up set and craft a special while also hosting “Late Night” and doing two podcasts?
“Lobby Baby” came out in November of 2019 and I hadn’t really started thinking about getting back on the road yet. And then, of course, the pandemic happened. I just spent a lot of time with my family during the pandemic, like everybody else, and just started writing down new material, and was really chomping at the bit to start doing it again, which was probably May of 2021. And then this has just been a process, so I’m sure by the time we actually filmed it, it was only about 25% of the same material. But it’s so different than the material I get to do on the show that I look forward to just having an outlet to talk about my family, mostly because it is the most universal thing I do and I like connecting with an audience that way.
That’s what I was going to ask. Obviously, politics is the lane of “Late Night,” but is it fun to be able to stretch a different muscle? Is it a conscious decision for your stand up to not be so politics-heavy?
Yeah, it is. I mean, I think you just want to have as many different outlets for the kind of ideas that occur to you as possible. We’ve talked about “Documentary Now” in the past, but that’s a completely different bucket as well. So, be it stand up or side projects or “Late Night,” sometimes you come up with a joke and it just doesn’t fit in the thing you’re currently working on. So to have other places and other platforms to try to make it work is really fun. And just in general, it’s nice. I love that I have a home game every night, doing shows in 30 Rock, but getting out on the road is great and certainly this last tour was mostly just American cities that I like visiting anyway, and it’s really fun to realize there are people out there who want to hear what you have to say.
You said you started writing during the pandemic. When do you know you have a special?
I did a tent show in a parking lot in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and I’d done a show at the Ridgefield Playhouse, which is their indoor venue. But this was early, early coming out of COVID, and I did two tent shows, and I walked off and I said, “Oh, I think I could film this tomorrow.” Then I realized what had happened was people were just so happy to be outside again (laughs). Like they were just so happy to be watching a performer, and in the successive shows I realized, “Or it’s gonna take two-and-a-half years.” But in talking to other comedians I’ve heard this, you just felt shot out of a rocket again when you got in front of an audience, and audiences were so excited. Because I think live performance was the missing element of the pandemic. Everybody could watch every old stand up special as many times they wanted to, but actually being out and seeing it live again, I think for both performer and audience, was a really cool thing.
Does that make it difficult to then modulate what to cut, what to keep, what jokes are good? How long did it take for you to settle into what was actually great material?
It’s a weird thing because you have to pick a point six months in the future where you’re going to shoot your special, and some jokes just keep getting better and other ones, you can’t figure out why they keep getting a little bit worse. It’s very rare for every piece of the special to be cresting at the same time, and I like the granular fine-tuning of a joke. Ultimately, I think the night we taped it in Chicago, I would say that’s top 85 percentile. It wasn’t the best one we ever did, and I’m sure part of that is because of the natural tightness you feel being aware that it’s the one that will be saved for eternity, but I was pretty happy with it the day it happened. But I remember in April, I did a show in Philly and like halfway through I went, “God, I wish the f–king cameras were here!”
You’re working with “Late Night” executive producer Mike Shoemaker and your friend Neal Brennan, who directed the special — people you trust. What’s that relationship like as you’re building the special? What feedback are you looking for?
Shoemaker is sort of the gentle soul in my feedback loop, whereas Neal is — I really like how direct and brusque Neal can be, which is no surprise to anyone who’s ever seen him on stage, but he’s also deeply loving, and he has a very good sense of who I am. What I don’t ever want is that thing where people are just telling me how I’m in really good shape, to give me any false sense of confidence. Neal’s really good in the run-up to it. I would send him recordings of the special and he always reminds me how important setting up a joke is, whereas I sometimes want to rush to the punch line. There’s sort of an engineering balance that Neal has that I often lean on him for.
Structure I know is a big thing for you, especially with something like “Corrections.” How does that relate to building a special? How do you navigate getting the right structure and finding the right moments for callbacks?
It was hard. Often in the way that someone’s first album or first novel or first movie has a lot behind it, “Lobby Baby” had this sort of natural narrative structure to it because that story was at the heart of the special. It was obviously easier to title as well. I was very happy the way “Lobby Baby” ended with doing stand-up from my wife’s perspective. So I did realize I didn’t quite have anything as novel as a way to end this, but I was really happy to sort of have these connective tissues of callbacks that I could piece within it, and I really have this deep appreciation for the fact that I have an audience that’s listening. Because callbacks only work if you have people who are paying attention to your choice of language and the way you select words. So often, that’s how it pays off. There’s like a trigger in their ear that tells them, “Oh, right, that’s from then,” and they appreciate the craft.
What did you take from “Lobby Baby” and apply here for your second special? Anything you wanted to do differently, or the same?
I maybe tried to get too clever with the way I address the Trump material in that and I wanted to sort of strip it down a little bit and just do jokes and material. I felt it was less important to show everybody how clever I was. I also didn’t want to go back and revisit “Lobby Baby.” Now, one of the nice things about when we were doing this edit, Neal said something that really resonated with me which is, “You’re never going to watch it again, and I’m telling you having watched it and having listened to it that this is a very good version of the show. So you can spend the next three weeks doing all these tiny edits based on what you don’t like or the way you’re making a face, but remember, you’re not going to watch it again.” So it was nice to give myself permission to not obsess over every tiny detail.
And it’s vital to be able to trust Neal on something like that too.
Yeah and I think we taped 75 minutes and that wasn’t even the plan. I was trying to do 65 and then it was just a really fun taping, so then all of a sudden you’re stretching out, and there’s a few things you cut, but now the audience is hot, and so you’re going, “Try to put it back in and prove to Neal that it works.” (laughs) Neal did his first cut of the special and I remember thinking, “Hey, where’s that bit? Where’s that bit? Where’s that bit?” So I watched the raw footage and you just realize he was right. It’s worth going back and checking, but also the best feeling is knowing that probably the soundest instinct I had in the whole thing was making sure that I had Neal behind the camera and Shoemaker backstage.
What’s the joke you’re most sad to not have in there?
I had a thing about preferring going to funerals over going to weddings, which played really hot out of the pandemic, because I was talking about how my favorite thing about the pandemic was not having to go to weddings. And I think having that connection to the pandemic maybe cost it. I think ultimately every comedian had this moment, which is, if you didn’t do a special two months out of the pandemic, nobody wanted pandemic comedy. So there were jokes like a person’s eyes are no indication as to what the rest of their face will look like. That was my takeaway from the pandemic. And the lower half of the face is almost never an improvement over what the top half is showing you.
Yeah there was a rush of films and TV shows that would pepper in people in masks in the background to make it more realistic, and that very quickly went away.
I remember a friend of mine saw it, and I’ve not checked his work, nor do I know if this is true at all, but he said that there’s not a lot of plague fiction because people realized that, once they lived through the plague, nobody wanted to read a book that took place during the plague. I think the same is true of the pandemic. When you have a joke that works, sometimes your memory for the best it ever went is very strong, and you think it’s going to come back around. The Neal Brennan Straight Talk Express is very helpful in moments like that. My favorite thing is I had a different title, and Neal said, “That is a catastrophic choice,” which is a really fun thing to say to a friend.
Well now you have to tell me the title.
You’ll get it because you’ve seen the special, but people who are reading it will be like, “What the f–k? Why would you f–king call it that?” My title was “White Man.”
(Laughs)
Adam’s laughing. I want to note that Adam’s laughing because Adam knows what that is in reference to. But Neal was like, “That is catastrophic.” My wife was very upset. She really liked “White Man.”
You talk about your wife and your kids in the special in a way that is really candid but also loving, but also very funny. There is a style of comedy that leans into the “My wife is such a pill, am I right fellas?” and you don’t do that. How do you toe that line while still being biting with the comedy?
I do a late night talk show, and then the rest of my life is being a husband and a father, and I really love it, but, that’s where all my material comes from. So I think there’s that thing, before you have a wife and children, you’re like, “I don’t know why people write jokes about that,” and then you have it, and you’re like, “Oh, because it’s the entirety of your existence.” But Alexi is so understanding of what it is I do, and there’s a great freedom she gives me to run it out as far as I think the rope will go. She knows that I’m not out there to insult her. And also, she always sees this material before I put it on tape. I remember being like, “I’m gonna try to do the hummus thing.” She’s like, “Don’t do the hummus thing,” and I’m like, “It works.” And then she saw it and she’s like, “Alright yeah yeah yeah, it works.” But at the same time, it was really important for me to find an end for that bit where she’s the winner, because ultimately a lot of the times I’m making fun of her for doing most of the work (laughs). So it’s important for me to remind the audience that I’m coming at this not from a position of strength, but from a position of weakness slash incompetence.
Have you thought about your kids watching the special someday?
I have. Ashe is very happy because obviously he knows Axel is the titular character in “Lobby Baby,” but Ashe is the one who said, “I have a secret that’s brown,” so he’s really happy. They like the Biden story. They’ve heard me tell a version of it, so I think they’re very happy to all be mentioned that way.
It’s not a political special but there are a couple of political jokes in there that feel very specifically peppered in.
There was — it’s not material about Trump but there were references to Trump and it worked really well and the first time Neal listened to it, he said, “You know, you can fight me on it, but I’m gonna take all that stuff out, because five years from now, 10 years from now, you’re gonna be happy it’s out.” And to be honest, I don’t know if I would have left the Biden story in if Biden was still running. As I sort of slowly put the calendar together when this is coming out I realized, “Oh, it’s right before the election.” Because it’s obviously a very sweet story about President Biden that I think you can actually hear as a sweet story now without the added weight of the political moment.
Your first special was at Netflix. What was behind the decision to go to HBO?
I should stress there was nothing negative about the Netflix experience. Everybody over there treated me great, and it was lovely. HBO made the approach and that brand, especially what they’ve meant to stand-up specials, was something that was important to me. One of the things is, when you work for one company for 23 years, it’s pretty fun to work with as many other ones as you can. When it’s time to get out of the house, it’s pretty cool to interact with a new group of people, and meeting Nina over at HBO was a really cool thing, and especially just the work that they’ve done not just historically, but I feel like in the last five years, they’ve sort of been doing a lot of really cool, well-curated, interesting stand-up. You try to improve the company you keep, and I think being at HBO does that for me.
I know you have a lot of experience creating a show from scratch every day with “Late Night,” but how stressed are you that “The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers” podcast has now caught up to the point that you guys are recording new episodes right before they come out?
Oh my God. It’s terrifying. Not only am I doing a show every day, but the fact that Andy is now basically an active cast member on “SNL” is eating up a lot of his time. So this is the moment we’ve always dreaded. And we gave ourselves, again, a two-year head start, and yet here we are. But I just saw Akiva this weekend at my brother’s wedding and I realized I haven’t actually physically seen Akiva in years. But the great thing about doing the podcast is I’m just laying eyes on some of my favorite people in the world, and it’s a really nice thing to throw out there to the deep comedy nerds who love those shorts as much as I did. I love doing it.
“Seth Meyers: Dad Man Walking” premieres on HBO on Oct. 26 and will be streaming on Max.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
