When an email included a list of guests that would appear in the New Yorker Festival this year arrived at my inbox, I knew I was going.
Since the launch of the festival in 1999, the event has been attracting celebrity in all kinds of business — politics, art, entertainment alike. Plenty of familiar names: Larry David, Malcolm Gladwell, Marc Maron, and many more. New Yorker is one of the few magazines that has utilized live event, attracting major brands as sponsors, as main revenue source.
This year, many celerities were scheduled to make appearances: Preet Bharara, the Southern District Attorney of New York for 9 years until fired by President Trump; James Clapper Jr., the director of National Intelligence under President Obama from 2010-2017; Al Franken, the Juniro Senator from Minnesota, who was also in the original cast of Saturday Night Live.
The tickets were expectedly expensive, so I could only choose a select few events to attend. Starting with New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy’s conversation with Seth Meyers, the host of Late Night with Seth Meyers on NBC. Having served as head writer of Saturday Night Live and the anchor of Weekend Update, a recurring segment since the beginning of the program in 1975, Meyers has proved himself to be an incredible entertainer on late-night television. During the conversation, Meyers explained the rationale as to why his program stood out comparing to other late-night talk shows.
Although being of a similar theme comparing to Stephen Colbert’s monologues and Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, the segment “a Closer Look” dissects the daily news surrounding the political realm in a deeper fashion; “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell,” a segment that usually Meyers presents with Amber Ruffin, a female African American writer, and Jenny Hagel, a staff writer for Late Night who also happens to be homosexual, is among the one of the most innovative and comedic segments in late-night television. Diversity has always been a issue in show business, being the host of the show, bringing in writers of different ethnicities and races to make on-camera appearances just makes the show more refreshing than many other shows; Meyers’ program comprises many elements of political and social issues long before the presidential election last year, he expressed the need to change his tones when political figures within the administration, evidenced by his interview with Kellyanne Conway earlier this year. “It’s show business at the end of the day,” Meyers said. “You don’t want to distance yourself from the prominent figures in Washington. Although that interview (with Conway) definitely put off a lot of people in the administration.”
An hour later in the same theater, legendary comic Jerry Seinfeld had a conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick. Different from many other comics nowadays, Seinfeld rarely curses in his performances on stage. He discussed the intensity he experienced when he and Larry David served as the executive producers of the show, including NBC frowned upon their innovative ideas, the intense writing involved in the process of creating each episodes, and the pressure to shoot a perfect finale.
Two of the events I attended in the festival were truly telling how difficult it could be in show business. Every person has different experience, but the same thing that everyone that made it in show business was that they wanted it hard enough.
