Late Night with Seth Meyers writer Jenny Hagel has spent the entirety of Donald Trump’s political career writing and telling jokes that ride a precarious line between funny and offensive. But the difference between Hagel and Trump’s anti-woke comic crowd is that she only ever targets her own demographic.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Hagel breaks down her and Amber Ruffin’s long-running “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” segment, including how they got Hillary Clinton to join in after losing the 2016 election and why they are able to get away with outrageous punchlines that could get people with the wrong intentions canceled.
She also discusses how Late Night has changed during the second Trump term, reveals some secrets behind Seth Meyers’ popular “Day Drinking” bit, shares her reaction to NBC’s decision to kill The Amber Ruffin Show, and teases her live comedy show Jenny Hagel Gives Advice in which she bolds tells audience members how to live their lives.
Nearly 10 years into her run as a writer for Seth Meyers, Hagel says that she never thought she would last this long. “I thought I would be fired immediately,” she jokes. And she definitely never thought she would be appearing on the show as herself. But it wasn’t long after her arrival that she pitched the idea for “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” to her friend and colleague Amber Ruffin.
They have since performed more than 50 editions of that sketch—including with guest joke-teller Hillary Clinton—in which they use their personal identities to deliver hard jokes that the straight, white male host could never get away with.
“Amber is Black, I am queer,” Hagel explains, so because the jokes are told from their specific points of view, she never really worries about going “too far” with the punchlines. And therefore, the jokes stand in sharp contrast to a certain type of anti-woke—and almost always male—comedian who is trying to offend in order to prove something about “free speech.”
“It’s very disingenuous when people are like, we can say whatever we want because it’s a joke,” Hagel says. “I think some jokes are jokes and some jokes are bullying disguised as jokes.”
For her, it all comes down to “intent.”
“What are you actually trying to say with that joke?” she asks. “The question to me isn’t, what is the joke? The question is, what is your intent? Why are you telling it? And I think that so often when people cry ‘woke’ what they’re doing is they want to say a mean thing. It’s just a burning desire in their heart to say a mean thing, and then what they want to do is use the word joke as a shield.”
Ultimately, Hagel continues, those comedians “don’t enjoy consequences,” adding, “It’s also very cowardly to be only interested in the reaction if it’s a good one.” As she puts it, the First Amendment may allow comedians to “say whatever they want, but then you have to live in the aftermath of what you said.”
When Seth Meyers was on The Last Laugh podcast just before the 2024 election, he predicted that no matter which presidential candidate won, Late Night would be “fine either way.” For Hagel, it is definitely surreal for the country to be back where it was politically when she started writing for the show in 2016.
“What’s interesting about being a comedy writer is you’re trying to write jokes about the world, but you’re also a person living in the world,” Hagel explains. Like many people who did not want to see Trump win in 2016, she says she spent his first term trying to find the one thing that was somehow going to take him down. “The second Trump administration feels different to me in that—not that I thought he was funny before, but it all seems so surreal, and I kept thinking this is going to end at some point. And I don’t have that the second time around.”
“I don’t have as much of a stomach for making jokes about the silly things that he does,” she continues, “because I feel like no, this is very real, he will be president for four years his will have a very big impact. And so it’s a little more challenging for me to find my way into some of the news stories.”
Fundamentally, Hagel says her job is to take in that day’s news and “find satirical ways” to write about it. “And there are some weeks where you’re just like, I don’t know, man, as a human being in this world, I’m tired.”
That desire to break out of the horror of the daily news cycle is part of what inspired Hagel to launch her live show, Jenny Hagel Gives Advice, in which she takes center stage to share her very real suggestions for audience members’ biggest problems.
“Because of the nature of the show. I thought I would get many more silly questions than I do,” Hagel says. “And people ask very honest, vulnerable questions. So it does create a lovely community feel for that hour and a half of like, hey, man, we’re all just trying to figure life out.”
For some reason, people have decided to take her advice seriously as well. “And they are fools,” Hagel jokes.
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
