Street sat down with All-Nighter Season 3 hosts Eliot Linton ’15 and Jake Robertson ’15 to get a behind-the-scenes look at Princeton’s favorite (and only) late-night talk show.
Daily Princetonian: So there was obviously a big transition this year, what with losing David Drew and all. How has that been?
Eliot Linton: Even though we have only done one show, it’s been cool to see how everybody stepped up. There were these great, really talented, amazing, smart, funny people and so there were a lot of things that worked for them to do but now that they’re gone it’s been awesome to see all of us — the other kids — step up and be able to do it all.
Jake Robertson: We’ve been able to establish our own dynamic for it, which I think is cool because I know that the founders didn’t want it to be just them. They wanted to create something that could live on after them and change and function depending on who was involved, and so the opportunity for us to put our own stamp on the show is really exciting.
DP: What do you want that stamp to be then? What are you looking to change from last year?
JR: I don’t know that we have particular things that we want to change — I think the more important thing is that we just utilize the strengths of this group in particular to reinforce the goals of the show. We want to reach a bunch of people on campus from different backgrounds and different groups and bring them together by showcasing the amazing people that we have on campus.
DP: What is the process through which you became hosts? Did you always know you wanted to be hosts?
EL: I’m sure I thought of it at some point. In the end, there was no one else my year who had been doing it [long enough], and there was also nobody else who made sense to do what Jake has to do but Jake. You need someone who is a good improviser.
JR: Someone who’s crazy.
DP: Do you feel your background in Triangle helped you prepare for the show?
EL: Head Writer Lauren Frost [’16] and I did a lot of the script preparation for that and we’ve both been head writers for Triangle. I think that helped in terms of putting a show together, getting people to write and giving revisions.
JR: Some of the sketch-writing principles that we learned in Triangle can be applied to writing sketches for All-Nighter. I think improv [Quipfire] definitely has helped.
EL: I did some stand-up freshman and sophomore year because I don’t have as much performance [experience] as Jake or David Drew or as I should, really, to be doing what I’m doing. But yeah, I did stand-up freshman and sophomore year and so that is the only reason I can do it.
JR: Even if you do have performance experience, it’s a very different type of performing — even from improv. In improv, you’re doing scenes and here you’re responding to people who aren’t doing improv, in the case of interviews and things like that.
DP: Do you guys draw inspiration from any late-night shows?
EL: Not really. I like watching clips from Conan [O’Brien] and Seth [Meyers] or whatever — I like Conan, because I think he’s the funniest. I think we get just as much from sketch things or other places of comedy. I think when we started, the show was very SNL-y. In particular, a lot of our sketches read like guests on Weekend Update — bringing out a person and trying to talk to them, but they’ve got some funny thing going on, and then they leave. I think we kind of got into a rut with that, but I think initially it was much more like Weekend Update than anything else. But we’re trying different stuff.
DP: Do you have a favorite sketch that you’ve done?
JR: I’ve done a lot of silly ones. Some of my favorites are ones that you can’t tell if it’s going to work until you go out and then it does. There was one that was called “Sad Pickpocket.” That was really odd. It was this guy who comes out, and he’s a theatrical pickpocket. I thought that was really fun, because it was a nice opportunity to be silly but it was also an opportunity to be kind of dramatic.
EL: Alex Moss [’14] wrote that [sketch] and he said that Jake gave much more to it than it ever deserved.
DP: What do you do when you start a sketch like that and it doesn’t go over the way you want it to?
EL: You only get one shot, so you just have to go on to the next thing.
JR: You just push your way through it.
EL: Nothing’s gone horribly wrong. There are some things that drag or never do that well, but you just take note. We rehearse everything once or twice and then just put it on its feet — that’s it, it never happens again. So you’ve got to get it right.
DP: How do you decide which sketches to run?
EL: It’s whatever we think is going to do best. This year there are seven or eight people that are writing regularly, and we really only have room for five, maybe six, things per show. In any event, you just try to put together the best show.
JR: You don’t want stuff that’s too similar. You want to have a variety of different types of pieces.
DP: Could you take me through the production process? Where do you start?
EL: It’s still kind of in flux. When we started, we did it over a month and then after a couple episodes we got to where we were doing it in two weeks. I think we’d rather get back to three weeks. Usually about three weeks out, we have a pitch meeting where we get together and talk about ideas. A lot of times we don’t have guests lined up yet so we talk about that and by the end we have a tier of who we want to ask first. Everyone leaves — hopefully with an idea to write towards — and then a week later we have a writer read where everybody comes in, ideally with just a sketch, and then as writers we all read them. If we have guest questions or monologue jokes then we’ll read them too. You just take note of how everything goes, take edits and then three or four days later we do an actor read. We call in some actors and we put the show together with as much of it as we have — we sit down, run it, time it and read the sketches. At the end, everybody, including the actors, sits down and gives feedback on everything. Then, you have a couple days to do final edits and then the actors start memorizing. Either Thursday or Friday, we go to Frist [Campus Center] and do rehearsals onstage.
JR: The actor read is always helpful because it’s nice to have new ears in the room because we’ve heard these things before and we either think they’re funny or not, so to have fresh perspectives on the sketches is pretty good.
DP: So do you let the actors make changes to the writing?
JR: Yeah!
EL: A lot of times, actors misread things in funny ways — maybe they do a line that’s slightly wrong. There’s a lot of times where we’re like, “Write that down, we need to keep that weird change.”
DP: Who has been your favorite guest on the show?
EL: I was really excited about Shirley [Tilghman] and [President Christopher] Eisgruber was fun too. I also really liked Singer too, especially because when we emailed to ask him, his response was so strange ... He basically completely trashed what late-night talk shows were and then was like, “But as it happens, I’m free that night, so I’ll do it.”
DP: What is the scariest part of each show?
EL: It’s different now that I’m the host. It used to be just how everything would go because we knew all the jokes and then when your sketch comes up, you’re worried if the actors are going to mess up a line or the people aren’t going to hear something or something is going to go wrong.
JR: When it came to this first show, because it’s such a change and people have grown used to the dynamic of the past two years, I was a little afraid. I thought, “Will they be willing to embrace this new dynamic that we have?” And luckily I think they were and a lot of our feedback was, “It’s very different, but we liked it a lot.”
DP: Have you guys been surprised by how successful the show has continued to be?
EL: Nothing was as surprising as how successful it was at the beginning. The story is that we thought we were going to do it in Whitman [College Class of 1976] Theatre, which is a [nearly] 70-seat theater. But we couldn’t use it so we reached out to Frist, which [has an approximately] 200-seat theater. We thought, “Fine, we’ll just fill up a bit of it.” But then the seats filled, the balcony filled and we turned away a line of about 50 people. After that, we’ve sold out every time. It was very cool to see it go well this time, and it was a relief, but it wasn’t quite as surprising.
DP: Have you guys started work on the next episode? Any spoilers?
EL: We know the professor guest, who is Brian Kernighan, who is a COS professor. He’s really nice and he teaches COS 109 [: Computers in Our World], which is cool because he’s very, obviously, qualified and into computer science, but he also wants to help everyone learn a little bit more about it rather than just teaching the really hard classes.
JR: He also knows tons about literature and is a very well-rounded guy, so it’ll be a really cool interview.
DP: Would you be interested in working on some sort of sketch show in the future?
EL: I think it would be fun. I think it’s a hard thing to get involved in, but it’s so fun to work on, and it would be really fun to work on it in real life too.
JR: I’ve always known that I wanted to do theater and be an actor, but this [All-Nighter] opened me up to a whole other world of performance beyond stage acting. Improv has done the same thing. I’d love to be able to perform and make a living out of it.
DP: Are there any pre-show rituals that you have?
EL: Not really. The hour before show is just everybody in the dressing room running lines. Any writers that are around sit with the actors and run lines. Jake and I run the monologue. It is just desperation — that’s the pre-show ritual.
DP: Do you feel famous around campus? David Drew [’14] was sort of a campus legend in his own respect.
EL: So, he had Quipfire, and he also had a much more memorable name than I do. Last year, Nick [Luzarraga ’15] said, “How are you going to host? You don’t have the name for it!”
JR: I don’t know what it would be. Eliot Lint?
EL: That’s it — that’s what I’m missing.
JR: It is nice when people say, “Hey, that was a great show.”
EL: That’s the main thing about performing and having your name on the thing. I’ve always worked on the show but now people say good job for it, which when you’re a writer they don’t.
DP: On a related note, what is the most rewarding part of producing the show?
JR: I’m just so honored to be a part of it, because it really is an incredible phenomenon that happens on campus. Being able to say that I made my contribution to this really amazing thing, I think that’s the most rewarding part of it. Also being able to share the stage with someone I really care about and explore a friendship in that way is really neat, too.
EL: I was just going to say doing a good job. It’s something I like doing, and so I enjoy anytime I feel like I do it right and make people laugh. I’m also very happy to have been involved with it from the beginning, because I feel like in small ways I’ve shaped it and helped with its voice. I came up with the name — that’s probably the most important thing I’ve done.
DP: What is the origin of the name?
EL: The origin is that we were supposed to brainstorm names, and I was a try-hard back then, so I came up with a bunch. There was one that I wanted more than All-Nighter, and so when we voted, I didn’t vote for All-Nighter. But I’m glad it won. The one problem with the name is that there are a lot of people who think that it’s a show that goes all night, and they think, “I don’t have time for that.” It’s something that we didn’t anticipate, and it’s kind of a bummer. I’ve heard about five people say that, so there must be more people that think it.
DP: On a final note, how has it been working together?
EL: It’s been great. We live on the same hall and we’re all always working on stuff together.
JR: It’s cool to be able to work on something new. But it’s also not just us, it’s very much the whole team collaborating.
EL: It’s good to know we can do it, and it also is good that we’re just around each other already. It’d be weird if we weren’t.
JR: If I wasn’t used to making fun of him and teasing him, I wouldn’t be able to do it onstage so much!
Look out for All-Nighter’s next show on Nov. 7.
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