Copious Notes

Saturday Night Live's Seth Meyers on stage at UK's Singletary Center for the Arts. © Herald-Leader staff photos by Rich Copley.

Seth Meyers reads the faux news every week on the biggest stage for American comedy, NBC’s Saturday Night Live, and he’s performed for President Barack Obama and other prestigious audiences. But really, as we learned at the Singletary Center for the Arts on Monday night, he’s just a slob like all of us, prone to making an idiot of himself when he meets the president.

“I said to myself, ‘Be cool,’ and you know you’re about to not be cool when you’re telling yourself to be cool,” Meyers told the audience that packed the 1,500-seat concert hall at the University of Kentucky. “George Clooney doesn’t go around telling himself to be cool all the time.”

Meyers went on to describe the ways he embarrassed himself when he met Obama. The first time, when the then-presidential candidate appeared in an SNL skit, Meyers, who is the show’s head writer, instructed the president on how to take off a Halloween mask, “something most children do every year,” Meyers noted. The second time, he managed to slap his girlfriend’s hand away when the president was about to greet her before Meyers’ appearance at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

Meyers told UK freshman they can't all leave after one year for a million-dollar NBA career.

Meyers’ appearance at UK, one of several stand-up shows he’s doing on his week off from SNL, was a mix of topical humor, similar to his Weekend Update segments, and self-deprecating slices of his life, like the time he got into a bar fight after unleashing his sarcasm on the wrong fellow drunk (it did not end well for Meyers).

The 75-minute set didn’t break any new ground in comedy, but it did keep the audience in stitches for much of the show and proved Meyers to be adept at a number of comic forms: jokes, stories, spontaneous humor. The strength of his act is riffing on shared experiences with the audience, such as a hilarious bit about the minuscule amount of French he retained from middle school and college.

Meyers had some jokes specific to the UK student crowd, like informing the freshman in the audience that not everyone gets to leave after a year for a job making millions of dollars.

“The NBA is the only place where they like it if you went to Kentucky for just one year,” Meyers said, noting a student could not go to a bank after a year of college and have them say, “Welcome to the management team.”

Though the 38-year-old is well-removed from his college years, Meyers was still in touch with his youth with stories like his and his friends efforts to catch a glimpse of nudity on late-night Cinemax movies when they were 13. “We celebrated like technicians at Mission Control, if Mission Control was worried about waking up their parents,” he said, and then mimed high fives and touchdown signals.

Monday night, Meyers proved that as entertaining as he can be live from New York, he was even funnier live in Lexington.

• Read more:
• ‘Justified’ fan Seth Meyers jokes that violence is sure to ensue after his Lexington stand-up show
• The anchor who saved SNL’s Weekend Update
• Photo gallery: Seth Meyers at UK

If there are bags under my eyes, you can probably blame them on Conan O’Brien — him, and 5:45 a.m. weekday reveille to take my kids to school. If I’m really using my brain, I tape
(no TiVo, yet) Late Night with Conan O’Brien. But either way, I try not to miss it. So, for this trip to NYC, I called ahead to get a ticket to a taping.

Truth be told, knowing I’d only have time to see one show taped, I debated between Conan (NBC photo by Dana Edelson, right, from a Nov. 8 episode with Will Ferrell) and The Daily Show. The selling point for Conan was that the Max Weinberg 7 is hands down the best band on late night TV, and I figured I’d get to hear more of them at a taping. I was right, though I didn’t figure on sitting in the front row or having Conan goad me into a man hug with Les, the dentist from Toronto.

But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The studio is on the seventh floor of the GE Building in Rockefeller Center. They gathered us together at about 4:20 p.m. yesterday (Nov. 8), where we waited about 15 minutes before being incrementally ushered through a metal detector and up to the seventh floor. The ushers were nice, though you occasionally got the sensation of nursery school teachers — “We’re going to put our bags on the table, open.”

I have long maintained that going to an event alone raises your odds of getting a good seat, and it sure paid off here. Being a single, I was ushered to a front-row, aisle seat.

It made me nervous. After all, being on the front row really increases your chances of being on TV. What if my hair was messed up, or there was a booger hanging out of my nose? What if I didn’t clap at the right times, or Conan singled me out for some sort of comic ridicule — there was an incident with Drew Carey at a Virginia Beach comedy club in the late ’80s (when Drew was skinny)  I’m sort of scarred by. What if, like the warm-up comic said, you looked up at the monitors when you  thought you were on camera and looked like a (bleep). More on the last one, later.

The studio was actually smaller than I imagined, the curtained area Conan enters through is not terribly wide, and the band takes up a significant amount of the floor space in the monologue area. Conan’s desk is snuggled right next to that area. There were numerous monitors for the audience to look at, which was sometimes useful, because depending where you sat, there was probably a camera in your way at some point. I don’t think I actually saw any of Seth Meyers during his chat with Conan. I was always told that part of the reason TV taping tickets are free is you’ll probably have an obstructed view, and that was true.

But how great to be in the same room with that band.

After the warm-up comic, the Max Weinberg 7 (NBC photo, below, of the band playing in Chicago with John Mayer) played, the only disappointment being regular trombonist Richie “La Bamba” Rosenberg was out. But we did get to hear trumpeter Mark Pender sing, and I really dug getting a closeup look at guitarist Jimmy Vivino’s rig. If you think they sound amazing on TV, live is something else again. And while folks at home are watching Head On commercials and the like, the audience is hearing the 7 jam.

Conan came out to briefly address the audience before the show, and my good seat earned me a handshake from the pale one. Then, in a very Conan-esque manner, he asked Les from Toronto for a hug. Then, he decided he wanted Les and I to hug. Thank God this was the warm-up, and not national television. There was a tentative moment, then a friendly embrace. Then Conan got Les to embrace Max, who gave him a set of drumsticks. Les gets around.

Around 5:30 or so, the show got started. The biggest obstructed view disappointment was not having a good view of Conan’s little tuck and jump when he comes out. It is to Conan fans what Johnny Carson’s golf swing was for his followers. If I ended up on TV, it was because I was sitting next to a gorgeous blonde woman in a black dress. Conan commented that usually folks show up for his show in jeans and backward baseball caps, so he repeatedly complimented this woman for dressing up. I caught myself in a no-no during one of those moments, glancing up at the monitor like a dork, while the camera was on us. The saving grace would be that if I am sharing a frame with her, no one was looking at me — BTW, the cameras probably missed her great red shoes with severe pointed toes and a red bow on the ankle.

Conan’s first guest was Chaz Palminteri (photo, left), who told a great story to tie in with my very Broadway week here. Seems Chaz was cast as an understudy in his first Broadway show. When he explained to some of the heavies in his Bronx neighborhood that being an understudy meant he went on when the star couldn’t, one of them asked, “You wanna go on?” (Cue Godfather music.)

Whenever the show has a commercial break, Conan pops up and chats with folks during the time, which seems to be the same length as an actual commercial break.

The musical guest was TV on the Radio (photo, right).
Initially, it seemed they would
play back behind the proscenium arch. But then the whole stage rolled out for them to play in the monologue area. Good band. Conan watched intently, tapping his foot as they played. One thing I love about Conan is he books a lot of bands that remind me of edgy, emerging groups I saw on the old Late Night with David Letterman in the ’80s. There’s a spirit of that late night classic Conan is keeping alive.

After the closing music for the show, Conan joined the group to wail for a moment on a song that had lyrics like, “Here’s the song at the end of the show! The song you never hear on TV.”

He seemed to be having fun, and the fun rubs off, whether its on TV, or in the studio. At least last night, I didn’t have to stay up until 1:35 to see the whole show. Well, I’m probably going to go and watch it now.