Late Night at the Democratic Convention: Politicians, Protesters and Dueling James Taylor Bits

The line got swallowed a little by applause in the studio, but at the top of Tuesday’s Daily Show from Chicago, host Desi Lydic said James Taylor would appear on the show after being bumped from Monday night’s Democratic National Convention programming. She said so again midway through the episode, only to inform viewers at the end that the singer-songwriter had, again, been cut because the show ran long.

A few hours later and a few miles away, CBS’ Late Show With Stephen Colbert opened with tape of Taylor singing “Fire and Rain” with decidedly less mellow lyrics than the original version. A sample: “I’ll set fires and I’ll bring pain/I’ll bend your limbs in ways that limbs should never bend.”

Both, of course, were bits: Lydic told the Daily Show studio audience during a break that the show wanted to play on the previous night’s overlong convention program, and the Late Show opening was dubbed (rather convincingly) over prior film of Taylor performing. Watch both below.

Although they were covering the same news events, in the same city, The Daily Show and The Late Show only overlapped with their Taylor jokes on Tuesday. The Hollywood Reporter attended both shows — here’s how they went.

The Daily Show

The Comedy Central show is set up at the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood for the week. It’s doing pretaped shows Monday through Wednesday before wrapping up with a live episode Thursday night, hosted by Jon Stewart.

Because Tuesday’s convention programming was just getting underway as taping began a little after 5 p.m. Central time, The Daily Show mostly used the first night of the DNC for material — in keeping with the show’s usual m.o. when it’s at home base in New York.

“We [usually] cover the prior day’s news the next day on the show,” showrunner and executive producer Jen Flanz told THR last week, prior to decamping for Chicago. “But there are general themes that we know they’re going to talk about at the convention, and obviously the Republicans are going to be out there reacting to what happened, so that that will all get folded in. We do it as much in real time as we can.”

On Tuesday, that meant an opening segment on how long poor President Joe Biden had to wait before he spoke Monday night, a “live” green-screen shot with Ronny Chieng wearing an American flag suit and a shot of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who was reportedly rather forceful in urging Biden to end his re-election campaign — holding a “We Heart Joe” sign on the convention floor. “That’s like the iceberg waving goodbye to the Titanic,” Lydic joked.

The month since Biden stepped aside and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris has brought an unending stream of news and reaction from political players and pundits that is The Daily Show’s stock in trade. Before Biden’s announcement, supervising producer Elise Terrell told THR, “We were like, ‘All right, we know the jokes.’ We know what we’re going after, and of course we’ll always come up with new angles. But this is just such a wealth of new information and new reactions and new attacks that are fun for us to cover. We’ve got two new Democratic candidates, essentially, and one new Republican candidate in J.D. Vance. Being able to tackle all of the different angles that have been thrown our way has been really, really fun.”

The show is having political figures as guests all week; on Tuesday, Illinois Rep. Lauren Underwood — who spoke Monday night at the convention — came on to discuss the work she’s done in Congress to advance bills to improve maternal health and outcomes and family policies. Her parents were in attendance as well — a fact discovered by the show’s warm-up comic, Vince August, when he was bantering with audience members before the show. “That’s never happened before,” he said of picking out a guest’s family to question before the show.

Lydic did a clean show — only pausing once to redo a line — and drew a number of huge laughs from the audience in the 863-seat theater (which is more than four times the size of The Daily Show’s New York studio). She took a few questions from the audience after just before the taping concluded, and the audience was out with several hours to spare before the show aired.

Or, perhaps, get across town to see another late-night show.

The Late Show

A half-mile walk and 20-minute el ride away from the Athenaeum Center is the Auditorium Theatre, a 135-year old building that seats nearly 4,000 people — about 10 times the capacity of The Late Show’s home base, the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan. The line for Tuesday’s show stretched for several blocks, and audience members watched a CBS News feed of the convention while waiting for the show to start.

The Late Show is broadcasting live all week, meaning the audience saw some of the same convention footage played for comedy an hour or so later. That was the biggest difference between the two shows on Tuesday — airing live allowed Colbert and his writers to joke about what viewers had just seen. He did bits about speeches from Bernie Sanders (“I came to sip soup and tax billionaires, and I’m all out of soup!”) and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (“I love Pritzker, but every time he appears on stage, I think his first words are gonna be ‘Yabba Dabba Doo!’”), among others.

Colbert also riffed on the song choices for each state during the ceremonial roll call of delegates, including Texas choosing “Texas Hold ‘Em” from Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album. “It’s a great song, but I do want to point out that the first lyric is literally ‘This ain’t Texas,’” Colbert noted. “Which, if I’m not mistaken, by Democratic Party rules, it means all of those delegates are now pledged to the great state of Beyoncé.”

The energy in the theater was high even before the show started. The audience cheered convention speakers, and — in a true measure of Chicago bona fides — there were audible boos anytime the CBS News feed showed delegates wearing the cheesehead hats associated with the Green Bay Packers. Actress Laura Benanti, reprising her Melania Trump impression for the first time on the show since June, had trouble with a fake mustache but pushed through her segment, earning big laughs in the house.

The boisterous mood did not turn heated, however, when pro-Palestine protesters interrupted Colbert’s interview with Pelosi. Colbert reacted calmly, acknowledging the protesters and promising to ask Pelosi about Israel and Gaza. After a second interruption toward the end of Pelosi’s time, he asked the protesters to listen to Pelosi’s answer and when they continued to talk over her, said “Please don’t interrupt my guests.” A few audience members in turn shouted at the protesters to be quiet, but there was no noticeable change in mood. The protesters left the theater of their own accord soon after, and the remainder of the show — House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries was also a guest — went off without interruption.

A group of demonstrators also gathered outside the theater during the broadcast, drumming and chanting “Nancy, Nancy, you can’t hide.” A few dozen Chicago police officers gathered around midnight and ordered the group to leave, saying they were on private property and would be arrested if they didn’t move on. They appeared to be walking away as I left the theater.