Eliana Willis

Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Earlier this year, before everything happened, I went to New York City to survey the state of American political comedy, which has never felt more important — or more fraught. At a taping of “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” I met a woman from Astoria who had brought a birthday present for the host: a mock campaign poster promoting Ripley-Hicks 2020 — the two main characters from “Aliens” — emblazoned with the slogan “It’s the only way to be sure.” At “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” I watched the warm-up guy wring big laughs out of a malfunctioning T-shirt gun, firing three or at best four rows back into a house packed with cheering fans — people who seemed genuinely to feel part of a movement, a wave of laughter crashing against a president who was, if not washed away, bound to erode at any minute.And then, on a blustery Thursday night, I went to the program that started it all: “The Daily Show.” From a soundstage near the western edge of Manhattan, I watched Trevor Noah put on a clinic in audience management. During one segment, he transitioned smoothly from his impression of the president to a righteous condemnation of sectarian violence in India, followed by a joke about green text bubbles. It was everything the genre now aims to be: breezily informative, morally upright and funny enough that the house knew when to laugh. After the taping, a Comedy Central representative led me backstage, down a hall that transitioned from production industrial to modern corporate décor, and through a warren of offices to a glassed-in conference room, where I met the head writer, Dan Amira, and the showrunner, Jen Flanz. Thinking about the difficulty of making political comedy that jibed with a broad audience, I asked if there was a type of joke they had learned not to do.Default Headline More

Before the coronavirus outbreak, tickets to join the studio audience of “Saturday Night Live” were a precious commodity — offered free by NBC, but so hard to obtain that some comedy fans were willing to pay money for them.But now the tickets to this long-running sketch show — still free, and still scarce — come with an added bonus: Members of its studio audience have been paid to attend.The payments are the result of new guidelines implemented by the state of New York, which has been regulating the reopening of businesses and industries during the pandemic.On Monday night, the state’s health department confirmed that “S.N.L.” had followed its reopening guidelines by “casting” members of the live audience for its season premiere on Saturday — the show’s first live episode since March 7 — and paying them for their time. (It is not clear how many audience members were paid guests.)Sean Ludwig, who attended the “S.N.L.” season premiere over the weekend, said that he and seven friends who had gone with him each received a check for $150 from Universal Television, a division of NBC’s parent company, when the show was over. More

Season 4, Episode 3: ‘Raddoppiarlo’As Timothy Olyphant strides confidently through the opening scenes of this week’s “Fargo,” it initially feels like an FX crossover event, as if Olyphant were reprising his role as the smooth-drawlin’ U.S. Marshal from the network’s long-running series “Justified.” But then he is offered a coffee.“In my faith we abstain from caffeinated beverages, hot or cold,” he says. He goes on to give a monologue about the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel, which is his long-winded way of introducing himself as a Mormon and servicing this season’s racial themes — one tribe was “cursed by God with skin of Blackness.”His name is Dick Wickware. You can call him “Deafy.”And with that, a sense of too-muchness settled over this season. Because now Deafy, who has come to town to nab our two lesbian fugitives, Swanee and Zelmare, is being partnered up with Odis Weff, whose O.C.D. tics have already threatened to turn “Fargo” into a Midwestern “Motherless Brooklyn.” It has been the creator Noah Hawley’s mission from the beginning to pay homage to the stylized universe of the Coen brothers, but his weakness for cartoony pulp has become a bigger problem this season than usual. The buddy-cop pairing of a Mormon and an O.C.D. detective would be pushing it even if the show weren’t so gummed up by quirky characters across the ensemble.The show stands on firmer ground when it dives back into the tensions between the Faddas and the Cannons, which were inflamed last week after Loy Cannon decided to make a play on the slaughterhouse. The Cannons’ rationale is explained in a typically roundabout speech from Doctor Senator (Glynn Turman) at a meeting with a Fadda family representative. Doctor tells the story of how Black soldiers were made promises about America that weren’t kept after the war, and a story-within-a-story about his discarded report on Hermann Göring at Nuremberg, which underscored that betrayal. The message? Black people have to take what’s theirs. Nothing will be given to them willingly.The response opens up a fascinating rift within the Fadda family that mirrors that of the Gerhardts in the show’s second season: With the big boss out of the picture, there’s a power vacuum to be filled because of the perceived weakness of his successor. The difference here is that Floyd Gerhardt, played by Jean Smart, turned out to be far more shrewd than her duplicitous adversaries in the family assumed. Josto Fadda may actually be weak — he looks like a toddler in the Godfather desk chair — and that’s an invitation for Gaetano to challenge him openly. Gaetano understands only brutality, which makes him an effective and frightening henchman but not necessarily the wisest strategist. It’s the equivalent of letting Joe Pesci’s vicious Tommy DeVito call the shots in “Goodfellas”; there’s a reason the muscle never “get made.”Gaetano’s plan is a multilevel catastrophe waiting to happen. His idea of a shot across the bow is to rub out Loy’s college-going son, Lemuel (Matthew Elam), which would surely trigger a full-on gang war, starting with the deaths of the two other sons issued as collateral between them. He has also decided to use this operation to test the loyalty of the taciturn Irishman in the family, Rabbi Mulligan (Ben Whishaw), who had unquestionably proven his loyalty as a boy by killing his own father.Then there’s the matter of undermining Josto, who will surely have to answer this act of brazen insubordination if he’s to retain his grip on power.And the disarray doesn’t stop there. Josto’s inadequate response to the hospital that refused to treat his father requires a second attempt on its administrator’s life, but he can’t even case the joint properly. Oraetta Mayflower spots him in the parking lot after having talked his target into a new nursing gig, then gifts him a matter-of-fact sexual favor that’s as Minnesota Erotic as the small-town call girls in the Coens’ “Fargo.” The purpose behind Oraetta’s mischief-making continues to be the big question mark hanging over the season, but she and Gaetano have identified Josto as the wounded gazelle on the prairie, and they’re pouncing on him simultaneously.Amid all this chaos, Loy looks utterly assured. He reads the entire situation correctly, like Marge Gunderson surveying a crime scene. The botched shooting gives him all the information he needs — Mulligan’s loyalties, the possible dissent within the Faddas’ ranks, the different implications of retaliation on his end.This is the type of plotting that “Fargo” has always handled well, when violence breaks out and characters scramble to figure out how to harness the fallout to their favor. Hawley just needs to gets out of his own way. Sometimes less is more.3 Cent Stamps:Coen movie references? You betcha. When our fugitives, Swanee and Zelmare, stage an audacious armed robbery of Cannon headquarters, they disguise themselves like Nicolas Cage’s H.I. McDunnough in “Raising Arizona.” That prompts a gender-flipped variation on “Son, you’ve got a panty on your head.” In the car scene with Josto, Oraetta uses the word “paterfamilias,” a nod to a George Clooney line in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?.” Gaetano’s nabbing the small, austere picture of the Italian home country recalls a scene in “The Big Lebowski” when a photo of bleak farmland is supposed to beckon the sexpot Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid) back to Minnesota.Chekhov’s apple pie pays off in the robbery sequence as Swanee farts and vomits her way through the job. It’s not clear yet whether the tainted dessert will pay off as anything more than a ribald joke, but it does give the sequence some added tension and dark comedy.Has popular culture turned on clam chowder? Between the clam chowder fountain in one of the “bad places” on “The Good Place,” which likened it to “hot ocean milk,” to a throwaway line here (“makes more sense to me than clam chowder”), the insults are coming by the ladleful.More evidence that “Fargo” is doing too much this season: The hospital administrator rolling the “r” in “macaroon.” A petty gripe perhaps, but overwritten moments like this have been piling up. More

It was perhaps the most anticipated “Saturday Night Live” season premiere in almost 20 years — the show’s first live broadcast in more than six months, hosted by Chris Rock, and its first to be produced under the new guidelines of the coronavirus era.The last live episode of “S.N.L.” had been broadcast on March 7; it was hosted by Daniel Craig and featured a few segments in which the show tried to find what humor it could in the looming pandemic. Then the show announced it was suspending its season altogether, only to come back with three episodes of remotely produced sketches, filmed mostly at the homes of its cast members.“S.N.L.” tends to generate its biggest audiences in presidential election years, and the series’s creator, Lorne Michaels, further stoked expectations by tapping Jim Carrey to play former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee.But the show is also contending with a slew of new health and safety regulations, and as recently as a few days ago, Michaels wasn’t entirely sure that he and his cast and crew could stick the landing: “We’re going to be as surprised as everyone else when it actually goes on,” he told The New York Times in an interview. And questions lingered before Saturday as to whether a live audience would attend. (It did, under visible restrictions.)That would have all been challenging enough. But then “S.N.L.” had to start its season by recapping a week in which President Trump was hospitalized for treatment of Covid-19 and in which the first lady, Melania Trump, along with several Republican senators and high-ranking Republican officials, tested positive for the coronavirus.Perhaps the closest comparable moment in “S.N.L.” history was the season opener of Sept. 29, 2001, the show’s first new broadcast after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That episode began with a call for unity from Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor of New York, who was flanked by police officers and firefighters as he told the audience, “Even as we grieve for our loved ones, it’s up to us to face the future with renewed determination.” Paul Simon played “The Boxer,” and Michaels famously asked Giuliani, “Can we be funny?” Giuliani answered, “Why start now?”This time around, “S.N.L.” simply opened with a sendup of Tuesday’s chaotic debate between President Trump and Vice President Biden.Presidential Debate Parody of the WeekThe segment opened with a voice-over promising a replay of the debate, “even though Tuesday feels like 100 days ago.” Onstage, Beck Bennett played the hapless moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News, while Alec Baldwin returned to his recurring role as President Trump.Bennett began to explain the rules. “Each candidate will have 2 minutes, uninterrupted,” he said, only to be immediately interrupted by Baldwin.“Boring!” Baldwin declared. He said to Bennett, “Tell that to my Adderall, Chris, now let’s get this show on the road and off the rails.”Asked if he had taken the test for coronavirus, Baldwin answered: “Absolutely. Scout’s honor.”Playing Biden for the first time, Carrey strode onto the stage in aviator glasses while making finger guns at the audience. He produced a tape measure, sized up the distance between himself and Baldwin, then picked up his lectern and moved it further away.Asked if he was ready to debate, Carrey answered: “Absolutely not. But I’ve got the beginning of 46 fantastic ideas I may or may not have access to. Now let’s do this. I’m holding my bladder.”Throughout the segment, Carrey (as Biden) tried to exercise some restraint: “Don’t let your inner Whitey Bulger come out,” he told himself. “Flash that smile they taught you in anger management.”Bennett, meanwhile, emphasized Wallace’s passivity. At one point he told Baldwin, “Mr. President, if you keep interrupting this debate, I’ll do absolutely nothing about it.”Maya Rudolph appeared briefly in her recurring role as Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. She told the two presidential candidates, “America needs a W.A.P.: woman as president. But for now, I’ll settle for H.V.P.I.C.: hot vice president in charge.”After Baldwin (as Trump) demurred on the topic of white supremacy, Carrey produced a remote control and paused Baldwin in midsentence. “Sorry, but I think we all needed a break,” Carrey said. “Isn’t that satisfying?”Speaking directly to the camera, Carrey added: “You can trust me. Because I believe in science and karma. Now, just imagine if science and karma could somehow team up to send us all a message about how dangerous this virus can be.”He looked over his shoulder at Baldwin, then continued: “I’m not saying I want it to happen. Just imagine if it did.”Before he, Baldwin and Rudolph ended the sketch, Carrey’s Biden introduced his own campaign slogan: “Make America Actively Not on Fire Again.”Opening Monologue of the WeekRock, the stand-up star and “S.N.L.” alumnus, wasted no time in addressing what he called the elephant in the room: “President Trump’s in the hospital, from Covid,” he said, “and I just want to say, my heart goes out to Covid.” He added that this was a unique show for “S.N.L.” and that, like everyone around him, he had been tested frequently.“I haven’t had so much stuff up my nose since I shared a dressing room with Chris Farley,” he said.Pointing out members of the “S.N.L.” studio audience that he described as first responders, Rock said, “They’re so good, we let people die tonight so they could see a good show.”Assuming that Biden would be elected, Rock said that he should be America’s last president ever and that a new system of government should be instituted after him. “What job do you have for four years, no matter what?” Rock asked. “If you hired a cook and he was making people vomit every day, do you sit there and go, ‘Well, he’s got a four-year deal; we’ve just got to vomit for four more years’?”More sincerely, Rock concluded his monologue with a quotation from James Baldwin: “‘Not everything that is faced can be changed,’” he said, “‘but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’”Musical Number of the WeekMaking her debut appearance on “S.N.L.”, Megan Thee Stallion used her performance of “Savage” to create a powerful and pointed interlude.During the song, Megan Thee Stallion, who was shot in the feet over the summer, paused in the middle of the stage. (She has said that she was shot by the musician Tory Lanez, who has denied responsibility.)The sounds of several gunshots were heard and the digital screens behind her were filled with simulated bullet holes. Malcolm X’s voice was heard saying, “The most disrespected, unprotected, neglected person in America is the Black woman,” as those same words appeared on the screens. “Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair, the color of your skin and the shape of your nose?” the recording, an edited version of a 1962 speech, continued. “Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet?”The next voice heard was that of the activist Tamika Mallory, from a recent speech in which she criticized Daniel Cameron, the attorney general of Kentucky, following the announcement in September that only one former officer would be charged with wanton endangerment after Breonna Taylor was killed in a police shooting in Louisville.The voice of Mallory said, “Daniel Cameron is no different than the sellout negroes that sold our people into slavery.”Megan Thee Stallion spoke next, telling the audience: “We need to protect our Black women and love our Black women because at the end of the day, we need our Black women. We need to protect our Black men and stand up for our Black men because at the end of the day, we’re tired of seeing hashtags of our Black men.”Weekend Update Jokes of the WeekIn their return to the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to speculate aloud about whether it was permissible to make jokes about President Trump’s hospitalization.Jost began by saying:Well, say what you will about 2020, but it’s got moves. This news was a lot for us to process a day before we came back on the air after four months off. And it all happened so fast. I woke up yesterday and heard the president had mild symptoms. And then four hours later he was getting medevaced to a hospital in what looked like the last chopper out of Vietnam. I’ve got to say, it’s a bad sign for America that when Trump said he tested positive for a virus, 60 percent of people were like, “Prove it.” And it’s been very weird to see all these people who clearly hate Trump come out and say, “We wish him well.” I think a lot of them are just guilty that their first wish came true.After joking that Trump was supposed to host “S.N.L.” next week, Che laughed and continued the riff:OK, serious voice. While in the hospital, the president isn’t allowed to see any guests, but he is expected to be visited by three ghosts. Probably one from his past, one from his — OK, look, this is weird. Because a lot of people on both sides are saying there’s nothing funny about Trump being hospitalized with coronavirus. Even though he mocked the safety precautions for the coronavirus. And those people are obviously wrong. There’s a lot funny about this — maybe not from a moral standpoint. But mathematically, if you were constructing a joke, this is all the ingredients you need. The problem is, it’s almost too funny. Like, it’s so on the nose. It’d be like if I were making fun of people who wear belts and then my pants just immediately fell down.As the segment concluded, a camera found Kate McKinnon in the audience, dressed as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom she often impersonated on “S.N.L.” McKinnon put a hand to her heart and wordlessly bowed her head as the screen displayed an image of a robe with a familiar neck collar and a pair of glasses and the words “Rest in Power.” More

With a month to go until the election, the comedian Seth Meyers and his “Late Night” crew are sprinting toward the finish line.“One of the most dreadful things about the last three-plus years is how quickly you have to move from one story to the other because something else insane has happened,” he said. “It was like being on a treadmill in the gym that someone turned up to the fastest speed and the highest angle. It was really hard in the beginning, but now we have very strong quads.”After broadcasting from his wasp-infested attic during the lockdown, Meyers is back in Studio 8G at 30 Rockefeller Plaza — albeit without a live audience. He and his crew are unleashing their gallows humor on NBC in “Closer Look Thursday” on Oct 8.“We don’t think we should be anybody’s first news source,” he said, “but we’re not a bad companion piece if you want the catharsis of, ideally, laughter.”Meyers is sticking around Manhattan, where he lives with his wife, Alexi Ashe Meyers, and their sons Ashe, 4, and Axel, 2. But even for this former “S.N.L.” funny man, some things are no laughing matter.“I hope you appreciate how stressful it is to come up with lists like this,” Meyers said with a rueful chuckle. “It has been so exhausting and I’ve gone back and forth so many times. If I panic, you’ll hear from me.” And I did. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. William Steig’s BooksI have this real appreciation for children’s authors now because I’m reading so many books to my kids. And I find that William Steig’s books do not try to sink down to what they think a kid would like. When I read these books to my 4-year-old, the level of focus on his face is so much more intense because they don’t take the normal journey that you would expect. The storytelling is unique in a way that grabs him. There’s something so refreshing about reading a kid’s book that I can feel elevating my son’s understanding of the world as I’m doing it.In “The Amazing Bone,” the passage I love is Pearl the pig asking the talking bone: “You’re a bone. How come you can sneeze?” And the bone replying: “I don’t know. I didn’t make the world.” It’s rare for a children’s book to acknowledge that there are unknowable things. And it’s also a great response to use for questions like, “Why is it already bedtime?”2. Tom King, Mitch Gerads and Evan Shaner’s “Strange Adventures”If you’ve been a fan of the DC Universe like I have for decades, it’s really fun when comic creators blow the dust off and show it to you in a whole new way. Tom King has a great history of taking secondary characters from the comics canon and breathing new life into them. It’s comics at its best. He and Mitch Gerads are a perfect match and adding Evan Shaner makes it all the better.3. Rhea Seehorn in “Better Call Saul”“Better Call Saul” is one of my favorite shows. But I want to draw attention to Rhea because this show started and you were focusing on all these characters that would, later in the timeline, appear in “Breaking Bad.” And there’s this incredible sleight of hand that has happened the longer the show goes on, which is this character you weren’t paying that much attention to in the beginning has now become the through line that is the most interesting as it comes to its conclusion. As an actor, she had this really difficult task of hiding that she was going to be the most interesting part of this the longer it went. So I tip my cap. The very slow reveal has been a real triumph.4. “Transcendent Kingdom” by Yaa GyasiShe wrote “Homegoing,” which was a book I just loved. Whenever I think about it, I think about the incredible sprawl of it and the fact that it takes place over centuries and in all these different locations. So I was really excited for her next book. This book lives in a laboratory and an apartment and, to some degree, the past. The scale of it is smaller, but it touches on addiction and family and even how the brain works. And it was stunning that the ideas were just as big.5. “I May Destroy You”The minute I started watching it, I thought: “Oh, I might be too old for this. Maybe this show isn’t going to be for me.” But it was just so deftly handled. [Michaela Coel] is such a good writer, such a magnetic performer. Early on you have this sense that you are in safe hands, that the storyteller knows what they’re doing, and if you go along with them, it’s going to be rewarding. It felt like an education and a comedy and a drama all at once. And it was the show my wife and I were most upset was over when it came to its conclusion.6. John PrineThere’s never been a period of my life where I haven’t been listening to John Prine. And when he tragically passed away [from complications of the coronavirus] this year, it was just another reason to go back and listen to his music. It’s music my parents introduced to me that I’m already introducing to my kids. I feel like no one wrote with more empathy and understood how people are and how people talk, and there was such a soft-edged humor to the way he wrote about hard-edged ideas. And I have no statistical evidence to back this up, but I don’t think you could be a bad person if you liked John Prine. “Angel From Montgomery” is one of my favorite songs, and you just can’t picture a serial killer putting on his gloves while that’s playing.7. Isaac Chotiner of The New YorkerDuring Covid, he did an incredible job of talking to scientists and medical professionals in a way that I found genuinely very helpful. In his best interviews, he gets people to participate in their own undressing and reveal the moral hole in their arguments. And in times like these, he’s a valuable asset.I hesitated naming a New York Times person, but David Marchese, when I’m feeling down, I’ll read his interview with Nicolas Cage. I mean, the person I most want to hear talk is Nicolas Cage, and I feel like he completely got unlocked in that interview in a way that was just sweet nectar. He talked about buying a dinosaur skull. That’s far more interesting to me than anything you read in most interviews. I’m sorry that I don’t have anything like that to give you.8. Old Pittsburgh Steelers HighlightsThe most irrational love affair I’ve had in my life is with the Pittsburgh Steelers. I thought as I got older I would be less affected by outcomes of games, but the reality is I’m not. It’s getting worse, and I spend a lot of time trying to justify during games that I should be happy that I’m in a loving marriage with two wonderful kids — and it doesn’t work. It’s so stressful for me that I found the real thing I enjoy is going back and watching highlights of games where the Steelers won. That way I can be happy the whole time. It’s an unfillable hole inside of me. I need them to keep winning to maintain my happiness. I’m aware that it is an unhealthy obsession.9. “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”I feel like my understanding of comedy went from black-and-white to color when I saw that film. I was home sick from school, and my dad went to the video store and he got that movie, and we watched it together. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder. I was probably 10 years old at the time, and every part of it was perfect. I would like to think it influenced my comedy, but it mostly just gave me permission to take gigantic swings because there are so many bold choices, including the opening credits. One of the credits is “Mooses’ noses wiped by …, ” and I remember thinking that’s the greatest joke I have ever seen in my life.10. His Mother, Hilary MeyersSo look, I’m taking advantage of the fact that this is going to run in print on her birthday [Oct. 4]. I don’t want to blame anyone over there at The New York Times, but her birthday has gone unmentioned for years. I thought we could rectify the situation by saying that, particularly with books and loving to read, none of that would’ve happened without my mom. I also want to mention her because she has emailed me this specific article in The New York Times multiple times. She sent me, for example, Sarah Paulson’s because we both read “A Little Life,” which was a book on Sarah Paulson’s list. She emailed me Andy Samberg’s and asked if the Thundercat that he mentioned was the same as the “ThunderCats” cartoon that I used to watch. Which it’s not. And I realize that the only thing that would be better than this is if I somehow got my mom to be an answer in the New York Times crossword. But failing that, I think that this hopefully will be a nice surprise for her on her birthday. More