Bill Carter
Contributor at The New York Times
Editor-at-Large at LateNighter
Author of 4 books including The Late Shift+ War for Late Night. NYT Media reporter for 25+ yrs. Exec Prod of doc series "Story of Late Night"
Articles
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2 days ago |
latenighter.com | Bill Carter
NBC is broadcasting a special tribute to the late Joan Rivers Tuesday night featuring lots of big-name comics paying homage to her trailblazing career as a relentlessly acerbic, standards-challenging stand-up, with the comics mostly delivering jokes written by Rivers herself. Toasting Rivers’ career is a worthy-enough endeavor, and the show has a lot of laughs. But there’s at least one thing somewhat jarring about it. It’s on NBC. Rivers and NBC did make history together, so good for them.
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1 week ago |
latenighter.com | Bill Carter
This Thursday’s Season 2 premiere of Conan O’Brien Must Go on the streaming service Max is reason for fans to celebrate. Not that there’s been a shortage of those recently. His podcast is already one of classics of that burgeoning genre. He turned eating nuclear-spiced chicken wings into performance art. He hosted the Oscars, spectacularly, and has already been offered and accepted a return visit next year. Those are just the recent hits.
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2 weeks ago |
latenighter.com | Bill Carter
As it moves decisively into a fictional world of late-night television during this, its fourth season, the Max series Hacks has won praise from people long-steeped in the workings, experiences, and frequent insanities of late night for its attempts at true-to-life accuracy.
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2 weeks ago |
latenighter.com | Bill Carter
Is writing jokes an art or a science… Or could it be an algorithm? Joe Toplyn has been at work for about seven years trying to prove artificial intelligence can really write jokes. Don’t laugh. He’s serious. And he has spent enough time in his career actually writing jokes and other comedy material for what he calls “the pinnacle of comedy-writing, late-night TV” to have a sense of what sort of material has a high probability of making a live, in-the-seats, late-night audience laugh.
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3 weeks ago |
latenighter.com | Bill Carter
A late-night comedy writer’s schedule is punishing. They wake early, check the news from overnight, and begin writing jokes before they fry some eggs (and if they’re regularly employed, yes, they can afford the eggs). By 9am, they will have composed several handfuls of jokes and/or bits that get compiled into a 50-page document that gets sent to the host, who then culls it down to 3-4 pages he’d like to do that night.
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Re Easter msg from POTUS. Almost nothing made of it. “Trump being Trump.” But previous President was besieged w q’s abt his mental acuity-not illegitimately. Why has not a deranged shriek of paranoia-as EASTER msg!-not initiated similar legit Q’s abt this guy’s mental stability?
This one is obvious. What he said-no, of course-would leave situation status quo. Trumpists say lying; supporters say he’s pleading not guilty. Principle wouldn’t change. No due process. The q is irrelevant. SC ruled: unAmerican treatment. Now Admin fakes tattoo. What’s that say?
He admitted he didn’t even ask him the question. Very odd.
As farce.
@JamesFLoveIV History repeats itself.
