Q&A with late-night talk show host Jay Putnam

UNC senior Jay Putnam recently hosted the premiere of “Good Night with Jay Putnam,” a late-night show for college students. Putnam developed an interest in comedy throughout his life and helped develop the show. As a member of UNC's sketch comedy group Chapel Hill Players, Putnam was approached to host a late-night show.

Staff writer Palak Patel sat down with Putnam to talk about the success of his show a week after its premiere.

DTH: Tell me a little bit about the first show on Feb. 2. How did that go?

Jay Putnam: When it came to filming, it was so great. Rita (Balaban) was really fun and so was Caleb (Pressley) was so much fun to have on. After the show, everyone was saying that is was a lot of fun. There’s definitely stuff we want to work on. We haven’t sat down to work through notes, but there are definitely things we want to work on. Monday had a really great response, and we were really excited about that. We were super surprised when sites such as Total Frat Move and Coed picked it up.

DTH: What inspired the concept of the show?

JP: When we sat down to think about the show, in one of our early meetings, we thought we’d love to make a show for college students. We wanted to be approachable from other age groups as well. We wanted any college student to be like, “I get that!” or “I know that!” So, we decided to make a show that has a warm and welcoming feel, but also a millennial, fun feel. We also wanted to make something that any college student could enjoy and laugh at.

DTH: Where do you hope this leads? Are you “Saturday Night Live” or “The Tonight Show” bound?

JP: I have no idea actually. Right now we're just focusing on the show and are surprised with the buzz it’s gotten. We just want to see what happens with it and make it better, better and better. It’s something we’re very proud of.

DTH: How many people have seen the show? How was the live audience aspect?

JP: Our first one was a live dress rehearsal the Thursday before the show and there were like 60 to 70 people there. The next day we had like 60. Both were full shows, which was exciting. We've been keeping up with the views, and the last I saw was about 8,200 on YouTube, and I think that's, in large, due to the exposure we've gotten.

DTH: How are you planning on moving forward from the first show?

JP: We were really happy with our first production, but really how smooth everything went. The rehearsal helped a lot before that. We had rehearsals before the dress rehearsal too, just to be sure. We worked out all of the details. Looking forward, it is great to have the groundwork laid. Now we can use what we learned from the first episode and continue to do something that was unique. We want to experiment more with the show and fine tune it. We want to figure out where the show could be better. We're going to try and create things that are new and interesting. It's very exciting to look back at what we've done and see where we can improve. We really love doing this for the fans and hope that comes through in our show.

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