In The Writer’s Room, One Woman Quietly Makes Late Night HistoryPosted in Articles, Audio, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, United States on 2015-07-17 16:16Z by Steven |
In The Writer’s Room, One Woman Quietly Makes Late Night History
Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2015-07-12
Eric Deggans, TV Critic
How do you write jokes for a TV comedy about race and culture when there are riots over how police treat black suspects, and a gunman just shot down nine people in a black church?
If you’re Robin Thede, head writer for The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, you think carefully about where you focus the joke.
“The thing about tragedy, is that it causes people to react in a myriad of ways … [and] some of them are very hilarious,” Thede says, laughing. “You don’t make fun of the actual tragedy. You make fun of the ridiculous ways people react to it.”
Her example: The way some news outlets focused on the involvement of the gang Black Guerilla Family when rioting broke out in Baltimore last April.
“You’ve got people on the news saying ‘Black Guerilla Family’ 4,000 times because they get a kick out of saying ‘gorilla’ when connected to black people,” she says…
…That voice first emerged in January, when Wilmore’s Nightly Show debuted in the timeslot originally held by Stephen Colbert’s Colbert Report.
Wilmore made a bit of history then as the only black man hosting a major late night talk show.
And Thede also made history: She’s the first black woman to serve as head writer for such a show. But she’s quick to counter the notion that The Nightly Show is just a parody of Meet the Press centered on jokes about race…
Read the entire article here. Listen to the story (00:04:09) here. Download the story here. Read the transcript here.