IN CONVERSATION:
Wyatt Cenac Has Some Problems to Discuss by Brian Josephs photos by Eric Liebowitz, courtesy of HBO
The former correspondents of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show are inescapable when it comes to podcasts and late night television. What’s equally as impressive as their ubiquity is the breadth of their perspectives. There’s the cartoonish political satire of Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, John Oliver’s unending British aghastness on Last Week Tonight, and Jessica Williams’s sisterly wit on 2 Dope Queens. The next Daily Show alum up is Wyatt Cenac, whose docuseries/talk show hybrid Problem Areas has joined Oliver and Williams in the HBO family. After first crossing paths with Colbert as a Saturday Night Live intern who got caught in a shoving match with Norm Macdonald during a pickup soccer game, Cenac eventually had viewers latching onto him and his lackadaisical voice during his Daily Show tenure from 2008 to 2012. He arrived with an everyman persona whose surreal tinges always felt like a reaction to nutty realities; his first Daily Show segment was about how the lack of polar bears made the primaries much less interesting than Lost. Cenac personalized that sensibility in his standups: 2014’s Brooklyn found him weirded out and cackling at white people suddenly appearing in Fort Greene (“Even the white people must think, ‘Shit, this is a lot of fucking white people’”). Overall, Cenac—who’s also made appearances on BoJack Horseman and Bob’s Burgers, in addition to starring in TBS’s sci-fi comedy People of Earth—has a sleepy tone that doesn’t quite register as a slacker’s, but more so as a middle-aged man who’d love to dream big if he could just get over his malaise. That perspective fits well with Problem Areas’ premise, which takes a pragmatic approach to how we can solve some of the country’s biggest issues. Cenac spoke with us about the goals of his new series, the ever-changing borough of Brooklyn, and whether America is just too weird now.
