Seth Meyers roasts his own comedy writers with a ‘surprise inspection’ of their jokes

Seth Meyers knows how to keep his writers on their toes.

“They write hundreds of jokes every day just to get the 10 or 12 we use in the monologue, and honestly a lot of those jokes just aren’t good,” says Meyers in the Late Night clip. “Sometimes I think they throw in a few stinkers on purpose just to fill the page.”

Cue a “surprise inspection” in which Meyers reads out jokes from various writers that were too bad, offensive or nonsensical to make the cut, complete with an actual naming and shaming of the writer in question. Most of them elicit groans or silence from the audience, but there is one gem in there about an alpaca that definitely should have made the main monologue.