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This past April, Jimmy Fallon—the host of NBC’s Late Night and one of the most dexterous impressionists on TV—took his cameras from New York to Chapel Hill to rendezvous with a top-secret collaborator. The show would be filmed onstage at the University of North Carolina, before a live local audience: a boon for Fallon, who counts college students heavily among his viewership. And the news that week—stories about Metta World Peace, a Minnesota artist trying to sell a nude painting of Mitt Romney, and a Florida hunter who mistook his girlfriend for a feral hog—was as much as a comedian could hope for. The nerve-racking part was the guest. For days, Fallon and his staff had been preparing for a figure so influential he could not be directly identified. “Our code name around the office,” Fallon told me recently, “was Bieber.”
On April 24, “Bieber” went live. Fallon ran his monologue on the UNC stage, folding in a couple of site-specific lines (“Duke sucks!”). The crowd, packed and eager, leaped to every punch line. Then the big moment came. “You might have seen this in the news, but President Obama has asked Congress to stop the interest rates on Stafford student loans from going up this summer,” Fallon said. “I want to slow-jam the news—and I’m not the only one.” The rear curtains of the stage swept open, and President Obama strode out, one hand waving high to greet the college audience.
In “slow-jamming the news,” an occasional feature on Fallon’s show, a guest expounds news items to a sultry R&B beat, and Fallon chimes in with singy interjections. (“Really as Barry White as you can get,” he explains.) As the show’s band, the Roots, struck up a groove, Obama started in: “On July 1 of this year, the interest rates on Stafford student loans, the same loans that many of you use to help pay for college, are set to double. That means some hardworking students will be paying about a thousand dollars extra just to get their education. So I’ve called on Congress to prevent this from happening.”
“Awwwww, yeah,” Fallon purred into his microphone, making bedroom eyes at the camera. “Things were heatin’ up inside Congress’s chambers, behind all those closed doors. So the president made a few discreet calls across the aisle. He said, ‘Hey. Let’s get together on this one.’ ” The crowd went wild.
In late June, to Fallon’s astonishment, Congress approved the bill to keep Stafford-loan interest rates from rising. “We were shaking at the morning meeting,” Fallon says. “Everyone had their coffees, and we’re like, ‘Dude! Did you see this? It happened! This is crazy—the slow jam worked!’ ”
If only Capitol Hill got down so easily. Still, Fallon’s show, exhorting young viewers to write their representatives about the loan rates, can’t be discounted, nor can his efforts to humanize the world’s most powerful leader with a touch of R&B. As Richard Nixon, famously defeated by the camera in his 1960 debate with JFK, discovered, politics long ago became a game not of direct populism but of image control across disparate media. Today, with candidates striving to break beyond the burnished shells of their election-season campaigns, news-oriented comedians like Fallon—bridges between wonky Washington ambition and the restless interests of an entertainment-bound public—are more crucial than ever in shaping how political image filters down to the voter in the street. Late-night comedy purports to be satire, but it’s part of the surface on which the country’s political future is forged. And the more its caricatures and comic narratives stick, the more the boundary between political life and entertainment blurs.
“Politics is pop,” Fallon says flatly. “Our job as comedians—especially me, as a late-night talk show, which is a broader audience—is to amplify what we think America is thinking.” It’s the week of the Democratic National Convention, and we’re sitting in his office, at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, which is bright and carpeted and filled with mementos: a Bee Gees lunchbox by the window, a tiny potted plant grown from a lemon Mick Jagger gave him, a giant plastic pickle that David Letterman, _Late Night’_s originator, gifted to Conan O’Brien and that O’Brien passed to him. “If it’s ‘Romney is a robot, he’s a stiff nerd,’ we amplify that. If Paul Ryan is too fit, he’s P90X guy. If Biden is a child who is always getting grounded by Obama, then we do that. If Obama is Mr. Cool, and everything he does is too cool. . . . ”
The amplification effort is helped by Fallon’s skill as an impersonator. In trying to exaggerate Mitt Romney’s stiffness this past summer, he imagined the candidate in a situation where easygoing authenticity was crucial: connecting with younger voters. The resulting skit had Fallon’s Romney recording a video blog—which he calls his “vlog blog”—and extolling the virtues of pizza, video games, and loud music. (“Blast that Discman!” he exclaims.) When Fallon noticed Twitter users saying that San Antonio mayor Julián Castro, who spoke at the DNC on opening night, resembled him, he went to work, and by the time the cameras started rolling the next day, his transformation was complete. “We have great writers, and we all just throw in jokes and see what we can come up with for a two-minute piece,” he says.
Yet Fallon’s roots aren’t in political comedy. He came to prominence as a cast member on Saturday Night Live but had been on the show for a couple of years before he did a single political impression. And when Lorne Michaels, _SNL’_s executive producer, suggested that he cohost “Weekend Update” in 2000, he resisted. “I go, No, thanks! I don’t even read the papers. I read USA Today because it has color photos,” he recalls. “And Lorne’s like, ‘There will be an interest—young people should be interested in this.’ ” He was right. Today, Fallon sees it as part of his job to use his monologue as a sort of CliffsNotes for the day’s political news. How to keep viewers informed without losing them? Fallon says his rule is to make fun of everybody but alienate nobody—to make his show available to viewers and guests of all stripes by steering clear of partisan identity.
This is, of course, a delicate and somewhat coy game to play: Fallon’s slow jam could hardly be described as nonpartisan, and his eagerness to have Romney on the show won’t comfort those who think he’s only chasing ratings. The more influential comedy has become in the election cycle, the trickier its symbiosis of entertainment and activism has grown. Jon Stewart, widely hailed as the left-leaning heavyweight of the election-season joke, has been criticized for taking his political influence either too seriously or not seriously enough—in effect, for dancing too blithely between his roles as performer and political critic.
Many younger comedians trying to turn their craft to the election feel similarly constrained. In 2008, Sarah Silverman, whose style combines outlandish controversialism with a cheery, faux-naive demeanor, starred in “The Great Schlep,” a short-form YouTube video encouraging young Jewish Americans to persuade their Florida-dwelling elders to vote for Obama. It was a viral success, and this year, she has offered more fare in the same vein—most notably, a two-minute video publicly offering to “scissor” megadonor Sheldon Adelson “to fruition” if he pledges his $100 million to Obama’s campaign instead of Romney’s. Silverman’s humor is everything that contemporary comedy should be: bold, topical, and startling in its absurdity. Yet she told me that finding the balance between activism and humor is a constant challenge.
“When you’re close to it, when it hurts you and when it affects you and when you’re passionate about it, it’s actually hard for you to do your job as a comedian,” she says. “There’s a certain distance you need.” Part of her solution has been to keep her comedy, however extreme, grounded in a sense of political urgency. “I may be dirty, I may be crass, I may say things that are not age-appropriate, but I always mean what I say—unless I’m being sarcastic.”
If Silverman brings an inviting edge to her work, Fallon has found his path by keeping stylistically upbeat. Standing in relief against Stewart and Stephen Colbert, whose hyperironized scrutiny of the political landscape has made them a favorite of media-savvy types, Fallon’s goofier, looser approach positions him at the head of a younger generation of comedians speaking to newer, perhaps less politically engaged audiences. “We’re pretty positive,” he says. “Someone who just went to rehab, someone who tried to commit suicide, someone who just got a divorce—we don’t hit them.” Whenever possible, he tries to spin his jokes away from a party line and toward quirkiness. (Example: “Mitt Romney says he wants to cut funding for PBS. When he heard that, Oscar the Grouch was like, ‘Seriously? I already live in a garbage can!’ ”)
These days, Fallon and his writing staff read four New York papers every morning. Between meetings, he’s constantly checking in with news Web sites—the Huffington Post, Fox, the Drudge Report—and Twitter to see what’s leading. As we talk, he’s already mulling a spoof on that evening’s DNC performer.
“I’m thinking I might do a James Taylor song—a ‘Fire and Rain’ song. It’s like”—Fallon swallows and constricts his voice to Taylor’s plaintive register—“I’ve seen Ryan and I’ve seen Bain. . . .” Then he stops—that’s all he has. “I just have to figure out how to do it,” he says.
Late-night TV has always been a platform for election-season humor, but it wasn’t until 2007 that its influence on the course of political campaigns became hard to ignore. That was the year Colbert launched a bid for the presidency, outperforming candidates such as Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson in preliminary opinion polls and earning the strongest support among voters in the eighteen-to-29-year-old demographic. It was also the year YouTube emerged as the medium of choice for the transmission of gags and gaffes. And 2007 was the year when young political novices got intensely fired up for the first time in ages. It’s been estimated that more than two million more young people voted in the 2008 presidential election than in the previous, with two-thirds of all young voters favoring Obama. Late-night comedy did not decide the election, yet it loomed closer to the nexus of decision than ever before.
If the 2008 comedy season had a defining moment, it was the point when John McCain came on SNL to cold-open the show with Tina Fey portraying his running mate, Sarah Palin. With her iconic bangs and perfectly executed one-liners (“I can see Russia from my house!”), Fey captured the candidate in all of her bizarre charm. “The final days of any election are the most essential,” McCain read to the camera. “This past Wednesday Barack Obama purchased airtime on three major networks. We, however, can only afford QVC.”[#image: /photos/5891edf0186d7c1b6493bc7c]|||Seth Meyers||| That opener, like most of _SNL’_s Palin-Fey skits, was drafted by Seth Meyers, the show’s head writer and the current host of “Weekend Update.” Meyers has been at SNL for eleven years, and he spent the weeks before the current season’s premiere, on September 15, watching the Republican and Democratic conventions, gathering material.
“The bummer is that at some point you’re watching four hours of cable news a night, and your brain is slowly dying,” he explained one afternoon in his office, a few floors up from where Fallon works. Meyers’s work space is smaller and cozier: a couple of careworn stuffed chairs, a couch, a wall of photographs, and a tidy, well-kept bookshelf. “You feel like one of those people cleaning up after a nuclear disaster. ‘Well, this is for a bigger good, but I think I’m going to die a lot sooner!’ ”
In trying to distill the weekly flood of news to a sketch or a slate of “Update” jokes, Meyers—friendly, fast-talking, and deadpan, with a tendency to swallow his laughter like a large lozenge—looks not only at what’s rising in public awareness but at how that news is being covered: Half of SNL’s political humor doubles as media parody. “Ultimately, what you’re trying to do is point out something people have been looking at but haven’t seen,” he says.
The stakes are high. Thanks to YouTube and Hulu, _SNL’_s political comedy has a larger audience than ever before. Election-season skits that might normally have faded from consciousness with the arrival of Monday’s news cycle hold the public attention for weeks—and so do the images of the candidates they offer. After Fey’s Palin appeared, viewership exploded across media (DVR audiences doubled to twice the broadcast norm; at least two-thirds of viewers watched the sketches online or on a DVR). Besides, Fey’s gags at Palin’s expense—including lines drawn from the actual transcript from the Alaskan governor’s infamous Katie Couric interview—undermined her hopes of credibility as a serious candidate. “Romney needs to be aware—and wary—of the potential danger _Saturday Night Liv_e and other comedy-news shows present to him,” Chris Cillizza wrote in a Web item for the Washington Post last spring. “Most people in the country still have little sense of who Romney really is.”
Actually, says Meyers, Romney presents a comic challenge—for the same reasons as John Kerry, whom he impersonated in the run-up to the 2004 election. “It’s very hard to exaggerate dryness to comic effect,” he explains. The show’s in-house Romney, Jason Sudeikis, was rumored to be leaving; recently, however, he was prevailed upon to sign on for this election season, playing the Republican candidate against Jay Pharoah’s Obama. In some sense, their debates will be less the shadow of the real ones than a floodlight turned on them.
Growing up in New Hampshire, Meyers used to watch the presidential debates in order to catch the references on SNL. These days, they offer him and his writers a chance to stay ahead of the game: “A lot of times, the debate won’t happen till a Thursday, and we’ll have to write something on a shorter turnaround than usual. But that also makes it really fun.”
This fall’s SNL season opened with Pharoah and Sudeikis facing off as Obama and Romney, trying to win America’s affection. The skit made fun of Obama’s imperfect record (“The economy’s in the tank, the job market’s horrible, and now even my foreign policy is under attack!”) and overconsidered verbal style, while mocking Romney’s affluent disconnection (“This summer, one of my horses failed to medal at the Olympics—so I know hardship!”). Later, the broadcast cut to a fake campaign attack ad (“Mitt Romney didn’t even have the decency to cover his mouth while sneezing”) and a teaser for “Clint Eastwood and Chair . . . the show audiences are giving a sitting ovation!”
By the time Meyers came on-camera for “Weekend Update,” the season premiere was serving as a sort of late-summer election recap. “A new poll shows that after the Democratic National Convention, Obama got a four-point bounce in the polls,” Meyers said with the brisk newscaster articulation he uses on set. “Which means he’s now only five points behind Bill Clinton.” He went on: “President Obama joked this week that Bill Clinton, who has been campaigning for him, should be appointed to the role of Secretary of Explaining Stuff. Hey, you know what’s another good name for that position? President.” Meyers gave one of his impish sideways smiles.
That Thursday, Meyers hosted _SNL’_s first midweek special of the season, Weekend Update Thursday, which premiered in 2008 as a way of responding quickly to the political news cycle. It was the week Mitt Romney was defending his recorded comments about “47 percent” of “these people” being committed to Obama. After warming up the crowd off-camera (“I’m Jason. I work here”), Sudeikis donned his slicked-back Romney hair and carried the candidate’s remarks to the extreme. “When I talk about ‘these people’ who don’t pay taxes, I don’t mean senior citizens, and I don’t mean members of our armed services, and I don’t mean Southern whites,” he confided cheerily to a dining room full of extras. “I mean ‘black people.’ ” It was a risky joke but a funny one, carrying the premise of the leaked video to an absurd degree. The point was not just to parody the candidate but to force viewers to laugh at the depth of their own worries.
Then Meyers took his seat on the “Update” set, wearing his dark suit and signature crimson tie. He batted around Romney a bit more (“Romney did not apologize for his comments, though he did say they were not elegantly stated—apparently, he meant to say, ‘Forty-seven percent of Americans are victims and have a sense of entitlement, milady’ ”) and then, so as not to leave the other camp unscathed, mocked Obama’s fraternizing with Jay-Z and Beyoncé (“Sounds like a good endorsement for the president, because when has Jay-Z ever backed a loser?” he asked as the screen flipped to the logo of the Brooklyn Nets). The audience loved it. During a commercial break, as Meyers conferred with Lorne Michaels, a blonde stranger beside me spun around to sound out a girlfriend. “Is he married?” she whispered.
Yet it was as host of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner last year that Meyers had a chance to put his instincts for political comedy to the test in front of a tough Washington crowd. The night—which lampooned many present and managed to work Donald Trump into a lather—was considered a success; still, Meyers has certain concerns about the competition. “Obama, who went before me, killed!” he says. “All I can do is tell jokes. He can also run the Free World. At the end of the night, if we do the same, he wins in a tiebreaker.”
The evening after Obama’s big speech at the DNC, I go to Jimmy Fallon’s studio to watch him shoot his show. It’s Friday—a big night for Fallon, since a lot of the other late-night shows go to reruns—and energy runs high in the room. Fallon opens his monologue with a joke about Justin Bieber and the VMAs, then continues: “Octomom Nadya Suleman says she doesn’t know who Mitt Romney is. Then it got awkward. She said, ‘He’s not one of my kids, is he?’ ”
When the first break ends, the stage goes dark, and Fallon walks on in a broad-brimmed hat. He’s holding a guitar. He takes a stool in the middle of the stage as the lights go up. “And now, performing at the Democratic National Convention,” an announcer’s voice says, “James Taylor!”
Fallon starts to strum gently. “Just yesterday evening I turned the DNC on./I had to DVR Honey Boo Boo,” he sings in his Taylor voice. “Watched both conventions, and I wrote down this song/’cause this November, we’ll vote for one of you.” His strumming intensifies into the chorus:
Oh, I’ve seen Romney, I’ve seen Bain.
I’ve seen Clinton speeches I thought would never end.
I’ve seen crazy guys talking to invisible men.
So I’ll probably vote Obama again.
The audience cheers, but Fallon isn’t happy—he’s not sounding Taylor-y enough. They take it again, and then again when he loses his place (“Sorry, guys”), and one more time when he says “contentions” instead of “conventions” (“Fuuuuuuuudge!”). Finally, he nails it, and the crowd erupts. As soon as the cameras go dead, Fallon wipes his hand across his brow in exaggerated relief and runs backstage once more, on to the next joke.