Peter Yang
July 30, 2015
Features

The Passionate Centrist

In the Comedy Central timeslot that was the Colbert Temple of Truthiness, Larry Wilmore brings a different POV to the late-night conversation.

Mike Flaherty

The set of The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore features several clocks that display the time not in the world's capitals, but in a range of disparate locales: Obama's Birthplace, Pompeii, a Florida mega-retirement community known as The Villages and East St. Louis, the site of last year's racially charged protests in Ferguson, Missouri.

And all those clocks' hands are rotating counter-clockwise.

In such a topsy-turvy environment, it seems fitting to meet Wilmore, Comedy Central's newest pseudo news anchor, at 9 a.m. sharp on a Friday that feels and functions much more like a Monday for all involved.

While Friday isn't a production day (the show airs Monday through Thursday), it is the day when the show's writers and producers map out the following week's episodes. The bicoastal Wilmore is winding down a 12-day hiatus that gave him just two days with his wife and two children in Los Angeles before he had to bounce back to Gotham.

But back to work he did bounce. TNS has been airing long enough for all involved to have found their sea legs, but it's still very much a work in progress.

“It takes a while for the show to seep into your bones,” says Wilmore, who got his new gig after eight gimlet-eyed years as the “senior black correspondent” on his show's venerable lead-in, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In fact, whatever your term for this quintessentially postmodern genre — fake news, political satire, wonk comedy — Wilmore's debut in the host chair places him in the rarefied company of inimitably informed wits like Stewart, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver.

So robust has the genre been that Wilmore represents its second generation, with The Nightly Show replacing The Colbert Report in the 11:30 p.m. timeslot. The Nightly Show is the newest iteration of this modern golden age, but it most resembles the oldest: Maher's Politically Incorrect, which debuted on Comedy Central back in 1993.

To put a finer point on it, Wilmore says, “If Politically Incorrect and The Daily Show had a baby, it would be The Nightly Show.”

Like PI, its centerpiece is a four-person panel of guests chewing over a hot and/or thought-provoking issue. Like TDS, it airs four times a week, giving it an opportunity/mandate to be newsworthy.

The series is the brainchild of Stewart, who's also an executive producer, along with Wilmore and Rory Albanese.

Last spring, after Colbert announced that he'd be leaving to host The Late Show at CBS, Wilmore — who'd been out in warm, sunny L.A. executive-producing ABC's hit comedy black-ish — approached Stewart about succeeding Colbert. “I said, ‘Jon, I don't know if anything like this could end up happening, but if it could, I'd love to do it with you.’”

As it happened, Stewart had been perusing audition tapes from aspiring Daily Show correspondents. “There were all these interesting voices of people you don't hear from on late-night television,” Stewart recalls. Wilmore, he adds, “just popped into my head as someone who could be a ringleader of that type of thing — who has the comedic chops, the intelligence, the authority to be able to wrangle a program like that.”

Kent Alterman, Comedy Central's president of content development and original programming, characterizes the Colbert-to-Wilmore transition as a story of “pain, loss, and opportunity.” Although the 11:30 slot was not earmarked for Stewart and his Busboy Productions shingle, Alterman was happy to give him the inside track on finding its new occupant.

“Jon did birth The Colbert Report and is an EP, so our interest was in going to him first to start the discussion,” he says. “Thankfully for all of us — and when I say ‘all of us,’ I'm including the viewing audience — he had an angle on it.”

The Nightly Show, Alterman continues, "is supplying something that doesn't exist in late night otherwise, and it has a really strong reason to be and a point of view, which is always what we look for."

In establishing that distinctive “underdog” flavor, it didn't hurt, Stewart says, that Wilmore is black. "The show is designed for underrepresented voices, so it would make sense that the host would be reflective of that ethos.” (In fact, its original title was The Minority Report, but that was abandoned after Fox announced a sequel to the 2002 Steven Spielberg film Minority Report.)

So it's no accident that Wilmore habitually refers to the show's panel discussions as taking place in his “barbershop.” He's referring to an enduring African-American social institution known for its freewheeling, combative verbal gamesmanship.

“In the barbershop, people can be loud, they can be opinionated, they can throw bombs at you, but it's never personal,” he explains. “It's always for the purpose of trying to enlighten you. That's the energy of it.”

A sort of corollary to that is the show's catchphrase-cum-mantra of “keeping it 100,” a bit of hip-hop–derived slang meaning to be completely, unguardedly honest in one's statements. (The final third of every episode in the show's first month, in fact, featured a segment called "Keep It 100." Now it's a more occasional feature.)

Such directness is a rhetorical sea change from The Colbert Report, with Wilmore's truth an earthbound alternative to the vertiginously high satire of Colbert's "truthiness."

But while The Nightly Show has featured episodes devoted to the state of black protest, black fatherhood and black women in America, it's also taken on broader, zeitgeist-y issues like designer babies, Mars exploration, lying in professional sports and guns on college campuses.

Panelists, meanwhile, have included an “anti-vaxxer” (an opponent of vaccinations), a pro-obesity advocate and a performer who defended Bill Cosby against sexual-assault allegations. Talk about underrepresented voices!

To the extent that the show is breaking new ground, it's in that very focus on specific topics and the obscure, if not unknown, panelists who address them. The end result doesn't always produce full-throated laughs, which is okay by its host.

"I always have to remember that I'm on Comedy Central, so there's always going to be a balance among interesting and provocative and funny," Wilmore says. "What I'm happy about is that because I'm on four nights a week, I can do a serious show and then do a completely silly show the following night."

Stewart agrees: "I don't think they should feel the pressure of a laugh every eight seconds because of the real estate that they occupy. What they should feel the pressure of is creating a smart, funny, thoughtful show that doesn't exist anywhere else. That, to me, is the worthwhile endeavor. Not some sort of subjective focus on, 'Well, you're on Comedy Central and it's 11:30 at night, so do a dick joke.'" He pauses, then adds, "That's what I'm here for."

In the end, of course, the show's fortunes depend on Wilmore consistently winning over an audience. And he's got a lot going for him there, some of it seemingly at odds with the fake-news métier. Because, really, to love Larry Wilmore is to love his trademarked sangfroid, that dimpled, moon-faced visage the very embodiment of whaddaya-gonna-do? resignation.

His is a largely unflappable, dry vibe setting up shop in a context better known for bug-eyed disbelief, antic shtick and archness.

"I'm not mad at it" has become another catchphrase of sorts for Wilmore, a shorthand for his inability to respond with vehemence to all the issues of the day or society's shortcomings. "I feel like I don't have to have an opinion about everything. Sometimes I'm just tired," he says. "When I say that I'm a passionate centrist, what that means comedically is that half the time I disagree with myself."

In any event, he adds, "It's not my mission statement to be angry or outraged."

None of which is to be mistaken for apathy — far from it. "I think doing The Daily Show helped to crystallize what were my strengths, and it's talking about provocative, interesting topics," Wilmore says. "Mine is a listening skill set — I love to gather information and then distill it and deconstruct it." Contrarily, he adds, "I realized I'm really not interested in small talk and pop culture."

If that sounds like the seriousness of middle age talking, well, it is. Wilmore is 53, which is just as meaningful as his race in terms of breaking new demographic ground. He's more than 10 years older than Maher, Stewart, Colbert and Oliver were when they started their first full-time late-night gigs. That's true, too, of David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and Jimmys Kimmel and Fallon. It's a telling irony of the current demo-obsessed era that hiring someone in his 50s can be called refreshing.

It's certainly been a boon for Albanese, who is showrunner of Nightly. He held the same job at The Daily Show from 2008 to 2013 and let himself be coaxed back to the late-night grind when he heard Wilmore would be helming the 11:30 slot.

"The person in this job has to have a very specific set of skills that is rare," Albanese explains. "Not that many people are funny, off-the-cuff, extremely smart. You need a producer's mind, you need a writer's mind, you have to be interested in these topics. And you need to have some gravitas."

That's where Wilmore's 30-plus years of hard-won experience come in.

A native of Pomona, California, he majored in theater at the local state university, Cal Poly Pomona, but dropped out when he started working in improv theater at L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum. The late 1970s saw him auditioning for The Gong Show and taking to the stand-up stage. By the early '90s, he was writing for such television shows as In Living Color; Sister, Sister, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, among others.

He went on to co-create Eddie Murphy's animated comedy series, The PJs, in 1999. In 2001 he created The Bernie Mac Show and won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for his work on its pilot. And no wonder: its use of single-camera shooting and direct address was virtually unprecedented.

"I was taking my cues from reality television, which was just seeping into the culture" Wilmore recalls. "At the time there was nothing else like it on television. That was very exciting."

Those innovations hit the airwaves the same year that Ricky Gervais's similarly groundbreaking sitcom, The Office, debuted in the U.K. Coincidentally, by 2005 Wilmore was writing for, and appearing on, the American version of Gervais's masterpiece. He was hired at The Daily Show the following year.

So if Wilmore seems preternaturally chill, it's because he's earned it. "Believe me, humility is always at the center of this. I know how fast things can go away," At the same time, however, he says of his status as an old(ish) hand: "It's calming, because you already done something.

"I'm not doing this show as a means to be successful,” he continues. “I'm doing it as a means to have this interesting conversation. At the end of the day, if I have to go back to L.A. and do what I was doing, I'm still a happy man. And if show biz goes away, I'm still a happy guy. I have two kids who I love and adore. I'm a contented person."

That doesn't mean he's not pumped for what the future holds. In fact, Stewart's recent abdication of the Daily Show throne — and the hiring of 31-year-old Trevor Noah to succeed him — means that by year's end, Wilmore will be the de facto anchor of Comedy Central's late-night lineup. "I'll really be the senior black correspondent," he says, laughing.

He'll also be heading right into the teeth of every fake journalist's dream job: covering the 2016 presidential elections. "I can't wait!" Wilmore beams. "I'm very interested in having the candidates keep it 100."

Good luck with that.


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