There is a sense that comedians really got high off their own supply in the post–Daily Show landscape. The sentiment became We’re the truth-tellers, man. We speak truth to power! But has power really listened all that much? Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues to deport U.S. citizens, welfare and SNAP keep getting eroded, and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner doesn’t even have a comedian anymore. At SNL50, Seth Meyers pitched a sketch about this very issue that did not make it to air. “I wanted to have all the impressions of Democratic presidents come out and just thank the liberal institution of SNL: ‘Thanks to your help, we’ve won six of 13 elections.’” In this week’s episode of Good One: A Podcast About Jokes, the late-night host puts Saturday Night Live’s election success in batting-average terms: “As much as people talk about how influential it is … sub-500. If you believe it’s truly on the liberal media, it’s wildly ineffective. And so there’s actually a bit of freedom of knowing that.”

It’s true: If your comedy can’t change the world, then it has the freedom to just be funny, and that’s a huge gift to be given. Meyers says that after the second Trump election, he sat down the staff and laid down the law; this was going to be a fun show, goddamn it. “We have to be the place where it is still joyous. It is joyful to do. It is joyful to watch,” he says. “It is gonna be the place where our power comes from not being sad all the time.”

Meyers also discusses a big lesson he learned from covering the 2016 election that affected how Late Night approached Trump’s second win. “Tonally, we realized we could not come out of the gates post–this election the same way we came out of the last one — which I think was sort of resolve and This isn’t who we are,” he says. “I think maybe [in 2016] we weren’t openhearted to the fact that there were a lot of people in this country who were disappointed and disillusioned, and we have to try harder. I didn’t feel that way in 2024. I wasn’t like, Again? So then it is Okay, so this is who we are right now. That doesn’t mean it’s who we’re always gonna be, but we have to accept that.”

Listen to or watch this week’s episode of Good One to hear more about how Meyers keeps late night light during dark times.

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 Involving all the presidential impressions telling the show, “Thanks to your help, we’ve won six of 13 elections.”