Last Week Tonight with Bonnie

On Tuesday, July 19 at promptly 3pm Eastern/12pm Pacific, I typed in www.lastweektickets.com/ to my browser to put my name and email down for the ticket lottery. It’s a very simple process, though you don’t hear back until a few days before the taping date. For us, that was by August 2nd. Due to some cancellations, we were contacted on August 5th with late openings for the show. Tickets for Last Week Tonight (LWT) are incredibly hard to come by and once you have attended any taping in the past you are asked not to apply for tickets again. Because we are not often in the NYC area, we decided to go for it (even though it caused some conflicts in our Saturday plans).

You still have to reply back to confirm that you will be able to attend. Note: they state you will be removed from their list of free television events if you confirm and do not attend. Then they have you do two COVID related surveys (one is a waiver and one is a health screening) after you confirm that you will attend.

Regarding COVID, as of this writing (August 2022) you have to have received your initial 2 doses of the vaccination as well as the booster shot. They are very specific about how to show proof of vaccination as well (only paper vaccination cards OR acceptable state apps/websites – they accepted WAVerify, as well as Docket and other state apps). My experience with this was a little stressful because they didn’t list WAVerify on their email specifically, though they did for other apps. However, their email correspondence was very prompt, and I received answers my questions within fifteen minutes.

On show day, they admit you starting at 3pm and no later than 3:25, but you can queue up earlier. They provided a KN95 mask (though we were asked to wear our own) and they checked ID and verified vaccination status. After that, you were sent through security (metal detector and bag check) and then you received a wristband and sat in a waiting room with other audience members.

The wait here was approximately 45 minutes. They provided water bottles and you could get snacks from the vending machine and use the restroom. Photos and cell phone use was fine in the waiting area, but you were instructed to turn your phones off before going into the studio. Once we got to the studio area (up a few flights of stairs), a production assistant put us in specific seating arrangements and then we waited around again. Unfortunately, they had some “legal issues” they were trying to work out, so our wait was approximately 45 minutes, and they gave us the impression that that was an unusually long wait time.

They have a comedian warm us up prior to John Oliver taking the stage. This comedian had the job of instructing us what to do, making us laugh and loosen up before John, and tossing t-shirts into the crowd.

Then John came on and he took some Q&A from the audience. I’m not sure if this would have been a longer segment if there wasn’t an issue they had to take care of, but it was fun nonetheless. The first question pulled no punches, and was: “What is your take on the current conflict on Armenia and the genocide happening there?”

He laughed, clarified that he was not laughing AT her and said, “I love this audience. Some shows their Q&A is ‘what sandwich do you like?’ here it's ‘what is your take on Armenia and genocide?’” and ultimately said, “That is a fantastic question and not one I feel comfortable going into in this format as it deserves a full episode.”

The questions after that were what the differences were between British and American humo(u)r, follow up about his mascot, and two questions regarding earlier segments. (He didn’t feel there was much of a difference now due to how much crossover there has been over the years starting with Monty Python and more recently with Jon Stewart and late night talk shows. His mascot is free from him and he doesn’t have any updates on them. And the earlier segments, I cannot remember the first question, but the second was yes, they will do a piece again on countries you might not have thought about, but obviously he won’t say when.)

After the Q&A they launched into a short bit about a frequent caller to C-SPAN and then their opening segment (which was about Alex Jones). After that, of course, it went to their Monkeypox segment. I won’t talk too much about the show or summarize that. It’s available to watch online, but I will mention that he only really messed up enough to redo takes 3 or 4 times. There was a part that he had to redo several times and he apologized for that, saying he knows that he knows it’s absolutely the best part of being an audience to have to pretend that a joke we heard not 4 minutes ago was 100% as funny as the first time we heard it.

At the end, there were a couple of pronunciations that he had to redo and once those were done, that was the end of the taping. There was a little bit more waiting to leave as they released us in sections.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, there was no photography allowed in the studio. But there actually wasn’t much to take pictures of. They have the set, but you sometimes see that in the episode and otherwise, it was just a long hallway with posters of the other shows, an elevator area, and finally you enter the studio. As we left, we took a few pictures outside of the building and headed home. All in all, it was a fun experience that I would love to repeat, but as we won’t we allowed to apply for tickets again, I may see about trying to attend a taping of The Late Show or The Daily Show.