Seth Meyers drops anchor for sold-out crowd
Share with others:
It's not often that we get a visit from an distinguished network anchor.
This one even tells jokes.
Seth Meyers, who mans the desk of "Saturday Night Live's" Weekend Update, took advantage of a down week to do a rare stand-up gig at the sold-out Byham Theater Friday night. Along with being the anchor, Mr. Meyers has been "SNL's" head writer since 2006, so he deserves a lion's share of the praise or blame for the skits.
Up until now, we've known him less of a stand-up comic than a sit-down satirist, per se. Unlike most comedians on the circuit, he doesn't have a resume of Comedy Central and HBO specials, so buying a ticket to this one was a bit of a crapshoot.
What fans got was about half searing "Update" wit, half standard nightclub fare.
Fortunately for us, we got some special stuff because Mr. Meyers (his father) is from Pittsburgh. "And when I say 'Pittsburgh,' " Seth said, "I mean Pittsburgh. I'm not pulling some Moon Township [b.s]."
His dad is, in fact, from " 'Sliberty," but, Seth said, he doesn't have a Pittsburgh accent -- "unless he's watching a Steeler game!" During those moments, his dad not only offers football analysis, but also he gets so wound up he starts yelling out assorted Pittsburgh facts: "We got more bridges than Venice!"
The comedian -- dressed down in a hoodie, jeans and sneakers with bright orange laces -- said his first item of business in Pittsburgh Friday was an old landmark: The Original Hot Dog Shop ("The O").
"I ordered the medium fries," he said. And we all know what that means. "I had enough food to feed a Sudanese village -- and enough grease to kill a Sudanese village."
Back to the Steelers, he acknowledged that he is a big fan but realizes that there are Steelers fans who virtually have no thoughts other than the Steelers, and he pictured them as they were witnessing the end of civilization: "Too bad about that nuclear apocalypse, 'cause we were gonna be good next year."
Not surprisingly, Mr. Meyers mined the comic gold that is the Republican presidential race but mostly with one-liners. He went one by one through the candidates. He described dropout Rick Perry as being your guy "if George Bush was too cerebral for you," and Ron Paul as "looking like the old guy in horror movies who warns the kids that the house is haunted."
As his set wore on, we learned some other things about him, like he's useless in a bar fight, he loses to 12-year-olds on Xbox Live, he's living with a woman now for the first time and is impressed by "the new towel situation" and that he spent a few years living in Amsterdam.
You can stay normal there for a year, he said, "and then after that you start sounding like Matthew McConaughey. Then after two years, you sound like Owen Wilson." He nailed both of those impressions.
At one point, he mentioned his falling out after the White House Correspondents Dinner with Donald Trump, who subsequently called him a "third-rate comedian." When Mr. Meyers steered his set into airline travel and Vegas, he didn't fall quite that far, but you sensed that you could have heard that stuff anywhere on a Friday night.
Happily, he wrapped things up by going into Weekend Update mode with news items that triggered the censors. We can't print any of those. Well, maybe one. It was a strange story about a man with no arms who stole a TV from an appliance store. "Police said, 'It was an easy arrest. The man was unarmed.' "
Rim shot.
First Published January 21, 2012 12:00 am
