'The Late Night' returns, bending old rules

As students settle into the new semester, a team of Penn’s brightest comedic minds is preparing to have them in stitches with the Sept. 30 launch of the second season of “The Late Night.”

Created last fall as the pet project and legacy of 2016 College graduates Emma Soren, Daniel Locker and Alexa Fecca, the entirely student-run show enters its sophomore season in the hands of new leadership excited to streamline and expand the enterprise.

“This show is the coming together of titans on Penn’s campus,” Digital Media Executive Producer and College senior Blue Bookhard said. He isn’t exaggerating — heavyweights in Penn’s comedy, production and multimedia circles are fusing their ideas and talents to produce “The Late Night.”

“I think in the first year it made sense for us to pretty much stick to how traditional late night shows do it,” Head Writer and College senior Maurin Mwombela said, but the “The Late Night” team has no intention of relying on the show’s past formula.

“Tradition is not something we’re trying to stand for,” Bookhard said. “We’re trying to blow that out of the water and flip the entire idea of a student-run show at Penn on its head.”

The show’s team anticipates change on numerous fronts.

“The biggest change,” Host and College senior Trudel Pare said, is the division of Soren’s enormous behind-the-scenes role into the three separate roles of head writer, showrunner and digital media executive producer. She added that this adjustment of internal structure, coupled with personnel changes and the installment of a female host, will alter the tone of the show.

Organization isn’t the only aspect of the show the team is tweaking. The format of the episodes themselves has also evolved. “‘The Late Night’ episodes used to be themed,” Showrunner and College senior Abigail Lowenthal said. “It’s better and allows for more freedom in creative content to have less formal themes...so that will give us more freedom.”

Because of the both live and online nature of the show, its leaders are looking to continue streamlining it and maintaining its raw excitement.

“I think we’re trying to bring a little bit more of a faster paced energy behind some of our sketches and some of our guest games and that sort of thing,” Lowenthal said.

Additionally, the host and co-host intend to engage more on set, starting “some little banter back and forth and some unscripted stuff,” Mwombela said. To help to maintain the show’s dynamic flow, the team is gutting the long, unscripted interview that slowed the momentum of last year’s episodes, Pare added.

“The Late Night” team seems thrilled about the addition of an element absent from last season and from most late night shows: stand-up comedy. This season “The Late Night” will have performers from Penn and other Philadelphia schools. While some talk shows employ stand-up comics to warm up audiences, this season will see them perform as acts on the show, Mwombela said.

As for promoting “The Late Night,” Bookhard assures he will focus on “marketing the living hell out of it and really getting a really huge audience.”

While the first episode of the season will be loaded with witty material, including satire about on-campus recruitment and interviews with the junior and senior class board presidents, it will also serve as “a test run to see how these changes are working and what we want to do moving forward,” Lowenthal said.

As the show enters this season, the students running “The Late Night” are less concerned with precedent and more with making their own rules.

“Something we’ve talked about is to allow ‘The Late Night’ to get a little weird and to get a little crazy humor,” Lowenthal said. “I think we’re trying to push a little bit, push the strict framework of what’s supposed to be in a late night show and get a little more kooky.”

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