This Week’s Cutest, Weirdest, Whoo-iest Late-Night Audiences

It was a big week for awkward audience interaction!

We don’t talk about live audiences enough here at “This Week in Late Night.” They change the tenor of every segment of every show. Remember during lockdown when these guys were stuck in their houses or doing shows for the crew? That was wild. Only James Corden really triumphed in that model, I think because Ian Karmel knew how to keep energy up in a mostly empty room from years of podcasting.

The late-night studio audiences are all over the place. They can be fawning (e.g., still chanting Stephen Colbert’s name to this day) or withholding. Seth Meyers does the best job of getting a laugh out of a non-laugh. He’s the most meta-aware host, commenting on whether jokes hit or miss all the time. That technique and the dressed-down attire definitely make him seem like the most loosey-goosey of the hosts. Jimmy Kimmel papers over silences, or throws to Guillermo if need be. I think that’s why he’s still the Oscars host — he’s unfazeable.

I mention all of this because the biggest moment in late night this week was actually an audience’s silence. When Anne Hathaway asked the Tonight Show audience if anyone had read The Idea of You, she got total dead air. It was the most quiet the usually frenetic Tonight Show has had for the ten years Fallon’s been in the captain’s seat. Fallon steered the ship back on course, making a self-deprecating (audience-deprecating?) remark that his audience doesn’t read at all. This clip was what broke through into the general discourse: a celeb humbled by the audience, then recovering from the awkwardness well. In that spirit, here are some other moments of awkward audience interaction this week in late night.

Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert Tied for Weirdest “Whoo!”

Audience members love a good “whoo.” Some can get overexcited and whoo where perhaps they should not. The two best premature whoos this week happened Monday night. Meyers got a weird pop for “Boeing airplane parts,” and Colbert had one on “myocardial infarc.” Meyers made a meal of his weird whoo, while Colbert merely pointed toward the audience like Babe Ruth hitting a weird home run.

Guest Chemistry on WWHL

This WWHL segment was fascinating because it was about weird audiences. (On Weird Audience week — how did they know?) Andy Cohen asked Kyra Sedgwick and Jim Gaffigan questions about audience etiquette, and then the audience indiscriminately booed and jeered the responses (unless that was an SFX button; that was unclear). But what made this segment really stand out was Sedgwick’s guileless reaction to Gaffigan joking that he’s never not had a sold-out show. C’mon, Kyra — this was a joke. Later in the ep he said Dark Pale wasn’t nominated for a Grammy because he’s gay. The pan could not be deader.

Cutest Audience Goes to The Tonight Show

You know that meme about the little German boy? Well that little German boy was on The Tonight Show this week, and Fallon gave him a hat. As part of the Tonight Show spon-con for the Kentucky Derby, the show gave out elaborate hats to the studio audience. And the boy who received a … vegetable hat on day three charmed me. He was so happy to be given a hat way too big to fit into his luggage. Side note: What is that hat? It kind of looks like a piranha plant from Mario, but maybe it’s a tomato?