Posted by While normies are out here in 2019 laughing at James Corden rap-battling Kendall Jenner’s tea cup pig, John Mayer is inventing the future of late night talk shows.
Late night is completely different today than it was even like 15 years ago. A bunch of old white dudes used to do bits and tell jokes and interview guests and now…well a bunch of younger white dudes are doing the same thing, kinda.
I’m not hating on late night talk shows necessarily, I’m just saying they’re not super funny anymore. People like Colbert and Kimmel are just reporting on politics with a couple of easy Trump jokes spiced in there, while you’ve got America’s 45-year-old 12-year-old Jimmy Fallon absolutely HOWLING at stuff like “Millie Bobby Brown’s trip to Whole Foods”.
I’m not saying either are bad, they’re entertaining, just repetitive. Fallon revived late night when he started doing all the music and games and stuff and it was fun but at some point it just became a Youtube channel that airs on TV. Any given day, if you go on the Youtube trending page you’ll see at least 1 or 2 late night videos with hundreds of thousands of views. For example, this video from James Corden is #9 on trending right now with 4 million views.
This is where Late Night is now, and it’s fine! Nothing wrong with it per se, but the future has already arrived. Instead of airing on TV and then uploading to a social media for more views, our very own Johnny Mayer decided to cut out the middle man and create his own social-media optimized late night show…on Instagram.
John Mayer is a very funny dude. You know this if you follow him on Instagram and Twitter where he posts all his weird thoughts and memes. He also guest-hosted the Late Late Show back in 2015 when they were looking for a new host and has done standup a few times (not perfectly, but not bad by any means). But I think one of the best demonstrations of his humor is in this video of John and Kanye in the studio making the unreleased song “Bittersweet”. He’s got a real “Ron Burgundy” style of arrogance that is impossible not to laugh at especially coming from his super average white dude persona.
I always loved his music, but I hated him as a person for a very long time. He was a notorious ego maniac, but over the past couple years he got sober and mellowed out and matured and now is just the absolute man. I mean, look at this music video he made for his summer slapper “New Light” and tell me you didn’t enjoy the hell out of it.
After laughing at his internet presence for a while I was pumped to see him live streaming often in the past year or so, and this evolved into a full blown show he calls Current Mood.
The show started out simple. He put up a little cardboard sign and talked about stuff he found funny for like 20 minutes. But now??? Now it’s a legit show. He’s got a live audience, he has a way to pull up clips and pictures while going live on Instagram, and he even has huge stars and musical guests.
On the season 2 premiere, John had Andy Cohen on as his guest (a famous tv show host himself) and he had Maggie Rogers as his musical guest. MAGGIE freakin ROGERS: the hottest [and I mean that in all sense of the word (please respond to my DMs Maggie)] musical act in the game right now. And she performed her hit “Light On” and it was DOPE.
It has everything you want from a late night show. It has a monologue where John shows off his joke writing skills. lt has games like “High or Not High” where John reads ideas he has and you have to guess if he was high when he thought of it or not. He’s got good guests interacting in a fun environment and unreal musical performances. All of which you can watch on your phone, which is one it’s best aspects. It has the stuff you watch late night for (celebrities, music, jokes) but without the tv executives forcing the hosts to churn out mediocre content that will perform well with “men over the age of 50 with more than 2 dogs”. John does the show when he wants and how he wants. Last week he posted a story on Sunday afternoon saying there wouldn’t be a show, but then said he had a funny theory about pants, made a poll on his story to see if people wanted to hear it and decided “F it, I’m gonna do a 20 minute episode of the show about pants”, and gave us this beauty.
This show is so different and has such a niche sense of humor that fits the internet audience it caters itself to so well. It’s offbeat and goofy in the best way and so perfectly fits John’s sense of humor. This is what we want out of a late night personality. We don’t need another clean standup comedian making lobbed up jokes about Trump’s hair or another “silly” middle aged man who tests well with 16-year-olds playing Fornite with the members of Stranger Things…we need John Mayer, and we need Current Mood. At least, that’s my current mood.
See what I did there.
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