I’m a late night fan. Every morning I sip my coffee and go on youtube to watch a 10 – 30 min video of The Daily Show, The Late Show, Last Week Tonight, Late Night… one of those.
My day does not start until I hear Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers or John Oliver talk to me about killer hornets, the latest controversy in American politics and Trump (these last two are usually together).
Ever since quarantine became a reality, the lives in front of the camera seemed to have changed even more than my own. My early morning company had to exchange a fancy stage with a full audience for their own homes. I might have been watching them on Youtube, but these guys weren’t youtubers. Now, they are.
John oliver on his white void
Seth Meyers with his quarantine look
Steohen Colbert: working with a very close filming crew
Stephen Colbert presenting from his bathtub
Trevor Noah presenting his show from his living room
Multiple cameras have turned into one and these hosts (and many others like Jimmy Fallon, Graham Northon, Jimmy Kimmel and James Corden) are adapting to this new reality.
Seeing how they are doing is honestly a little inspiring.
At first, I made fun of Stephen Colbert’s audio in his infamous bathtub video in his first Stephen at home series. It made me smile to think of this big media guy, with his own show and awards and white house correspondents dinner monologues, not knowing something I did.
If you are ever recording in a bathroom with your crappy middle-class-aspiring-artist camera, block the bathroom door and put some towels all around the floor, because it is a great trick to reduce reverberation.
(I think) Stephen did not know this the first time he recorded in his home and his bad-quality video was a kind of revenge for independent filmmakers. The fancy stars would have to adapt to the “proletariat” of audiovisual, maybe even seek some how-tos on google.
Every morning during this quarantine I continued my ritual and, little by little, their shows started to change (except for John oliver. He is just in a white void of sorts and his sound is fine). Seth Meyers has all these bits about his actual quarantine life and the moths in his attic, Stephen’s family now helps him with the show‘s recording… a Brazilian late night host invited his family to sing with him in protest of the government’s mistreatment of artists and the Brazilian culture in general… Life is hapenning for them.
If the bourgeoisie of media are adapting and overcoming, maybe we can do that too. Life does not need to stop. It changed, it was bad. It is currently bad. At times ,we will have to live with the unconfortableness of a show host making a pause for laughs with only silence behind them.
Nevertheless, we still create, we make things, we learn how to muffle the bathroom sounds and the show, innevitably, goes on.
