Kristen Bartlett’s entire TV comedy-writing career has revolved around Donald Trump’s presidency. She became a writer on Saturday Night Live in 2016, before joining the staff of the late-night series Full Frontal With Samantha Bee in 2018. And between the two shows, she’s spent four years telling Trump-related jokes, parsing his press conferences, and trying to cover his actions without serving as a mouthpiece for his administration. That’s why, she told me over Zoom late in November, “I feel like I haven’t slept in four years.”
So when, after a long week of ballot counting, the election was finally called for President-elect Joe Biden, Bartlett and her co–head writer on Full Frontal, Mike Drucker, felt relieved, even with the legal battles that followed. The outgoing president would no longer be a mandatory comic subject. “He gave a press conference after 6 o’clock the other day,” Bartlett recalled. “We were just like, ‘No. This is after hours. We don’t have to cover him right now.’”
Trump has been a singular challenge for writers in the late-night landscape. An obvious target as a candidate—with his verbal gaffes, body language, and appearance contributing to facile impressions and shallow punchlines—he killed the joke when he won the White House. As president, he placed traditional late-night shows in “a rock-and-a-hard-place situation,” Drucker, who worked as a writer for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon until 2016, explained on the call with Bartlett. If a late-night show avoided Trump jokes, it’d be seen as out of touch; if it leaned into covering Trump, it had to do so seriously without coming off entirely humorless. “They’re shows that for 40, 50, 60 years are more song-and-dance shows,” Drucker continued. “Johnny Carson would talk about the news, but then he was doing fun bits with celebrities. Jay [Leno] was the same way, Jimmy’s the same way … A lot of these hosts that weren’t politically oriented had to work really hard to figure out what direction they should be going with this.”