Image via standupny.com
Seth Meyers
November 21, 2014
San Francisco, CA @ The Palace of Fine Arts
I’ll admit it: this is very different from any kind of event that I’ve ever reviewed. Shameless Promotions & Media is primarily a music website. Actually, that’s an understatement: 99 percent of the posts on the Shameless website are music related. But when certain opportunities are presented to me, I can’t turn them down. This was one of them.
I’ve been a fan of Saturday Night Live for years, ever since I was allowed to stay up and watch the show. The Weekend Update segment quickly became one of my favorites. Great comedians like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Jimmy Fallon took the reigns of the segment around the time I began watching. But another face that has become a familiar staple in the sketch comedy world began hosting the segment: Seth Meyers.
Meyers came to The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco this past weekend, and performed to a nearly sold-out house. I was excited, but slightly skeptical because I had never seen any of Meyers’ stand-up act. No Comedy Central special, no monologue on SNL; just the Weekend Update segments and his routine on the new Late Night With Seth Meyers television show on NBC.
The show was hilarious; all of the years of being a head writer at SNL and doing shows have clearly paid off. Meyers knew how to set-up and deliver each joke incredibly well. Nothing felt forced; his demeanor with the crowd was very natural, and it made for a better set-up and delivery of each punch line. His act lasted a little over an hour, and he concluded in the perfect way: reading jokes from Late Night and Weekend Update that never got past the censors. If you ever get a chance to see Meyers live, do it. Watching reruns of Weekend Update segments just won't cut it.