The Mission Is to Be Funny: A Conversation with ‘Late Night with Seth Meyers’ Head Writer Alex Baze

A well-oiled machine. That’s the goal when you’ve been on air for twelve years (and going…) delivering topical news through the lens of comedy – the best medicine. There’s something quite romantic (the writing career aspect) of finding your creative partner, the voice of your words, and making a go at it, developing your comedy chops, your stamina in the biz, and making a living out of it all. And that’s, from what I can tell, is the career-long relationship between Late Night with Seth Meyers Head Writer Alex Baze and host Seth Meyers.  

Alex Baze discussed with Script the challenges and surprises of running a daily show, the evolving nature of the show, the importance of understanding Seth Meyers’ humor, the writing-power behind “A Closer Look” and the balance between being funny and holding political figures accountable.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: As the head writer of a Late Night show, what has been or was the biggest surprise for you in terms of the responsibility of taking on a show like this? Or did you feel pretty primed going in because of your background?

Alex Baze: I worked with Seth [Meyers] at “Weekend Update,” so I knew a lot coming into this, at least in terms of who I was working with and what sorts of things might be interesting for him to do. I didn't anticipate when we first started the show… we weren't sure what it was going to be. We we're trying a lot of different desk pieces and styles, and I didn't anticipate how intense it was going to be to have a show every day. [laughs]

I didn't realize... how much material you have to generate just to fill the time, and then on top of that to get top shelf material. How you had to create basically five times the amount of material you actually use. The first couple of years you don't know what the show is. I thought we would decide in the first month or so what we were going to do, and then that's what the show would be. [laughs] It just kept being this thing I always tell people, it felt like running across a bridge that's collapsing behind you [laughs] every day, we just barely got enough stuff written to get a show up. And then you come in the next day at zero.

It's all topical, and you got to read the news that morning, and then you start running across the bridge again. It takes a long time for the host to fully form, and for the show to fully form around him. I think I was a little shocked by the pace.

Coming from SNL, where you have a full week to sort of get it together, and if something goes haywire on Friday, you have a little emergency, but you still have most of the show intact. That was the rude awakening. It's like, ‘Oh, it just doesn't stop.’ [laughs]

Sadie: Which is both good and bad at the same time.

Alex: Yeah, it's thrilling that way. I never felt like we didn't have something - we had a show every time. There were times where, it would be the middle of the afternoon, you're like, ‘I don't know, I think we got to cancel it,’ [laughs] and then you keep typing until it comes out.

But happy to say we're in a much better place now, where we know what the show is, we know what the host is, and what he wants. I feel like this is our payoff for those two years of chaos. It's like we get to relax a little bit…

Sadie: In terms of you working with Seth Meyers and working in tandem with him, I'm sure by now you two have developed a shorthand, and you know his voice and delivery – but with you building out your writers’ room and getting them on the same page, what was that like?

Alex: Yeah, that does take a long time, and some people catch on faster than others, of course. I had to learn patience with that, because I was with Seth for seven years at “Weekend Update,” and I feel like, as far as his joke-telling voice, we kind of co-created that, so it's in my head. It's like pre-installed software for me. But people would come in and they'd write jokes and I’d be like, 'Who is this for? Don't you watch the show? And I had to realize that watching him perform is not the same as working with him, being in the kitchen and understanding why he rejected that. Why does he love this so much? I don't love it, but he loves it. Let's make it work. People only see the finished product. You don't necessarily pick up that ability to cook with him very quickly...

All of our writers came in through different doors, and some of them were improvisers, and some of them are stand-ups, some were primarily actors who did writing, some are primarily writers who did a little acting - so everybody was on a different track.

We used to, when we had a little more time, we used to tape at 6:30 now we tape at four, when we had a little more time, we would, at least for the monologue, we would all go into his office, and he would read every monologue joke we wrote that day, like 200 jokes, and they could sit there and see him reacting, and I was like, OK, now you guys are in the kitchen. Now you see him huffing, you see him smiling, you see him crossing things off, you see him shrugging - you are getting a little education - people got up to speed.

Sadie: Is there any fear or maybe a weird sense of joy when he reads out the jokes that failed miserably in the room, in that new bit he’s been doing? Or is it a big prize that your joke, no matter how terrible it is, is getting air time?

Alex: They love it. [laughs] I'm pretty sure. At least as far as I can tell, they love it.  It started off as just a frustration I had sometimes with some of those jokes that were so off base, and I would show them to other people and go, ‘Can you believe this?’ And then I finally was like, ‘We should just do them, and then Seth can shame them.’ [laughs] It goes back to that whole idea that we need to do a show every day, and what can we do. Well, what do we have? We had these terrible jokes that Seth hated. Let's put a frame around it, and then we can use it. We got some bricks laying around, let's build something with that. [laughs]

Sadie: Yeah, and it works.

Alex: Yeah, because it also gives him a chance to improvise a little bit, which is hard to pull off. He's a great improviser, but it's hard to create a place for it, and he loves burning people for their bad jokes, so it all works out. [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] It's a win-win.

Alex: A rare win-win. [laughs]

Sadie: Let’s chat about "A Closer Look" which is one of my personal favorites. There's such great setups and payoffs in that, and obviously it's all centered around politics, or mostly. And as they say, you can't beat a dead horse, but you guys have found a way to get a lot of mileage out of beating a dead horse.

Alex: Yeah. [laughs]

Sadie: There’s a lot of steps and a lot of moving pieces, but how do you go about finding the thematic framing?

Alex: Well, we have one guy who writes the draft, and he has a research team - they're extraordinary. Early morning or the night before they are framing out, here's what's shaping up to be the main story tomorrow. They'll pull relevant clips, and will kind of frame it out with Sal [Gentile], and then he writes a draft really fast. I don't know how he does it – he came over from MSNBC World, so he's used to writing an A block.

It's a little bit of a mystery to me, because I come in when I get the draft, usually at noon. Did I mention we tape it four? [laughs] So at noon, Seth and I will get a draft. We'll both go through it, try to write in more jokes, maybe make some cuts, maybe there's some things that are redundant, maybe we want to leave room for something that happens even later that day.

We have the ongoing problem of taping at four, and airing at 12:37, is that we miss a lot of news anyway that day. We obviously we can cover it the next day, but to make it feel fresh at 12:37 is a challenge. We go as late as we can. Only a couple of times we've had to hold the taping a little bit because something monumental happened at like 4 o'clock and then we're like, ‘Well, we got to get this in,’ and we had to push the taping a little. But Sal is very good at creating a thesis, and then sort of any news that comes in later that day can sort of hang on the same thesis.

Sadie: In terms of the sketches, what’s the process behind knowing where and when to implement those, especially with tying it around the news, and then whatever guests you might have in the fold?

Alex: Almost every day is a monologue and “A Closer Look”. Only the Tuesday show is the only one where we have room for other kinds of bits, because we don't have “A Closer Look” on Tuesdays - there's a little more lead time on them.

Thankfully, we now have a pretty good carousel of repeatable bits that we've done, and we're always shopping for new stuff. We just schedule it a month or two out, so Tuesday, two weeks from now, we'll do “Jokes Seth Can't Tell,” and they'll get to work on that, and then we'll work that through several meetings until it's ready to roll.

We have a pretty set schedule now. Once in a while we'll have a short bit that we'll do an act four or five on “A Closer Look” day, not that often anymore. “A Closer Look” is so many things; it's a lot of jokes. It's also sketchy sometimes. There's bits. There's video. We don't feel like we're shorting anybody on performance. Seth has become quite a performer. It's really just Tuesdays that we are always looking to fill.

For the writers' room, it's a delight that they have a day where it's a little less topical, they get to be wacky, they get to be on camera, which a lot of them delight in. We just have such a set schedule now that it's not really a scramble.

Sadie: A relief, I'm sure.

Alex: Yeah, that's my theme, I'm done scrambling. [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] Well last questions for you – with this political climate, and comedy, and the different shows that are on that cater both - there's definitely a fine line in how you spotlight or put a spotlight on political figures, especially now. It can feel like in some instances, it could feel like we're giving them an easy pass where they become a cute meme or something. And I feel like, as a comedian, as a writer, and what you guys are doing on this show, there’s a responsibility of not letting them get away with it and holding them accountable in some way, even if they don't want to be accountable. There’s a fine line - how do you still punch up and make it work for us?

Alex: Yeah, well, we do have sort of an ethos around that, which is, we try to remember that the mission is to be funny, to be entertaining. I don't think we get very far with 'how dare you, sir' comedy. It's not what we want to do. I don't think we have any illusions that we're changing the world or anything like that. I do believe that mockery is kind of the best medicine, at least the best medicine we have in stock for fighting fascism. So that's really our guiding principle - yeah, we can hold them to account. Yes, we can point out the fascism and all the encroachments on our liberties, but is it a good joke? Is it funny? Will people laugh?

I think everyone tries to remember their audience. The audience, at least on television, is people who are up in the middle of the night, watching, and they don't want a speech or a lecture at that hour, they want a few laughs. Obviously, they agree with us in principle, we're preaching to the choir, I guess, but  the choir went to church. [laughs] We have this sense, yeah, they know it's bad... but they'll feel better if we can make fun of them, and that's our little dent in it all, and like I said, that's the mission.

Late Night with Seth Meyers airs Mondays-Fridays on NBC (12:35-1:35 a.m. ET).