I’ve been digging the new Seth Meyer Late Night because of its laid-back, low-maintenance atmosphere. It really feels like talk shows did in the ’60s (or before), eschewing the flashy and wild for real-time, reasonable-scale chat. It plays like the third half-hour of the Tonight Show back when Johnny Carson’s show was 90 minutes. Carson used to have authors and thinkers on for the final segments.
In that spirit, last night Seth Meyer hosted David Remnick, editor of New Yorker magazine. Remnick’s appearance began with a serious discussion of the current situation in Russian and Ukraine; Remnick once had dinner with Putin. Then came a commercial, and then a wondrous routine which staged New Yorker cartoons by Matthew Diffee, Paul Noth and others as if they were one-act plays.The wobbly set in one of the cartoon playlets really made it real for me.

At the very end of the credits in the full episode (found here) is a final poke at the pretentiousness of stage actors.

Bonus theater content on this episode for New Haven theater junkies: one of the earlier interviewees on the March 18 program was Kathryn Hahn, a 2001 Yale School of Drama grad whose student roles included Sally Bowles in Will Frears’ productions of the musical Cabaret at the Yale Cabaret in 1999 and Frears’ thesis project The Master and Margarita in 2000, a passenger in Annie Dorsen’s audacious rendition of Stanislaw Witkiewicz’s Crazy Locomotive at the Yale School of Drama, and Queen Popsy in The Birds (adapted by Len Jenkin, directed by Christopher Bayes) at the Yale Rep in 2001. Now Hahn’s known as Lily Lebowski on Crossing Jordan, and more recently for Parks & Recreation, Girls, Free Agents and the new Fox cartoon Chozen.