The week after First Lady Melania Trump issued a statement praising LeBron James for the “good things” his new school was doing for the community, which promptly followed her husband’s random Twitter attack against the basketball star, the host of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah declared to his audience, “Melania’s just over it.”
“Really? That’s all you’re going to say?” Noah joked. “That is a woman scorned in a relationship. If you’ve ever grown up in a house where two adults are fighting, that’s pretty much what it is. Like, you’ll be at dinner. I remember my aunt would do that to her husband. Everyone would be eating something [and] someone was dishing up some food and my uncle was like, ‘No, no, no. Don’t put the gravy on top. Put it on the side.’ And then my aunt was like, ‘Yeah, he likes things on the side.'”
The studio audience erupted into a combination of gasps and laughter. Even a cameraman and another studio hand in the background of the shot cracked a smile when Noah mimicked everyone at the dinner table casually trying to ignore the fight. It’s a truly wonderful (and recent) moment from The Daily Show, but unless you follow its many social media accounts, you’ve probably never seen it. That’s because Noah’s comedic hot take on Melania’s shading of her husband-turned-president is from the show’s “Between the Scenes” segments that don’t air on television.
For the second year in a row, The Daily Show‘s popular digital-only program received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Short Form Variety Series. They took home the trophy last year, beating out the likes of Epic Rap Battles Of History and Honest Trailers, but with this year’s nomination, Noah’s pet project has undoubtedly proven its worth beyond the scripted, blocked, and rehearsed world of the show. Segments like the host’s “fight” with the French ambassador to the United States over a World Cup joke have become just as popular as the broadcast itself, if not more so.
So why hasn’t any of it got on the air?
For starters, “Between the Scenes” — or some other, more broadcast-friendly version of it — hasn’t made the transition to the episodes Comedy Central airs four times a week because that was never Noah’s intention.
“‘Between the Scenes’ has become this really cool way to connect with the audience on all kinds of conversations happening in the world,” Noah told Uproxx. “Sometimes it’s a continuation of something we did on the show, or something happening in pop culture — but it has the ability to touch upon more serious topics, or it can just be downright fun and jovial.”
As executive producer Jennifer Flanz describes it, “Between the Scenes” stems primarily from Noah’s background in stand-up.
“It was Trevor’s idea. He does a lot more audience work than Jon [Stewart] did,” Flanz told us. “Jon used to do a Q&A at the top of the show, but we no longer do that. Now we do ‘Between the Scenes,’ which is Trevor talking to the audience between acts.”
She adds, “He definitely wanted to interact with the audience a lot more, and the idea came about originally because it was to meant to help him work out possible material for the next day’s show. We would talk about something that we thought might be a headline the next day and then try out some material on the audience, to see how it went over. It’s just something Trevor really likes to do. He goes out on the weekends, does stand-up and tries out new material that we eventually do on the show.”
Jocelyn Conn, a senior coordinating producer, adds that the inception of “Between the Scenes” also came from realizing the practical means of making something extra were already available to them: “We had the cameras out there, they’re out there waiting for him to finish these segments in between the acts, so we were like, ‘Why don’t we just keep the cameras rolling on him so if he were going to try something out for the next day, we could go back and look at it to see what works, to see what people responded to?’
“And sometimes there would be things that were so timely,” adds Flanz. “We were like, ‘Let’s not wait for tomorrow’s show. Let’s just get it out right now.’ That’s basically how it came about.”
“It tries to capture a version of Trevor that’s looser and just shooting the shit with the audience, which the audience really seems to like, and putting it out there,” Flanz continues. “Some of them are very unplanned, like completely off the cuff, and some of them are ideas that we’ve been hashing out all day, or that Trevor talked about at our morning meeting. Either way, he’s basically talked it through before with us, and shared his feelings on it. They’re all very much his feelings. They’re not scripted. They’re all from whatever he remembers from those discussions, and we don’t produce them.”
As it exists now, a popular web-only series whose contents often go viral on social media, “Between the Scenes” was never meant for broadcast. Hence why, when asked if this will ever change explicitly, Flanz and Conn answer in the negative. Yet this doesn’t mean that the jokes, stories or feelings Noah expresses in them have never influenced, or actually made it onto, the air. In fact, sometimes the occasional quip or off-the-cuff remark from the comedian will become something the team decides to use for a broadcast segment, even in the same episode.
“I feel like it was a Space Force joke, or maybe a Melania joke, Flanz notes, “but there definitely was one recently where we tried out something between the scenes and then we were like, ‘We’re still going to use that joke on the air because it was really good.'”
And sure enough, some careful digging through The Daily Show‘s YouTube archives reveals multiple examples of bits or subjects first addressed in “Between the Scenes” that were used, either as inspiration or verbatim, in an actual act of the episode.
Consider the Space Force segment from the show that aired Monday, August 13th with guest Spike Lee. In a longer bit from the episode, Noah addressed the new branch of the military that was first announced by Trump and, earlier that day, discussed at length by Vice President Mike Pence. “This is going to sound crazy,” he began in what became that day’s “Between the Scenes” entry, “but I realized how lucky America is that Donald Trump is president and not him.”
“If Mike Pence was president, I promise you he’d be able to get away with all the things Trump is doing, because he’s just quiet,” Noah continued. “If Pence was in a serial killer movie, he’d be one of those quiet serial killers that walks behind and stabs you out of nowhere and you wouldn’t know. Whereas Trump is the kind of serial killer who’d make his own scary music.”
Despite how much his serial killer comparison made him and the studio audience laugh, Noah and his team didn’t end up using it in the show itself. However, the same structure that he used to compare and contrast the boisterous president and his oft-silent vice president did.
“It’s nice to have those two lanes to think about whatever you’re pitching, or for thinking about an idea or the way things are covered,” says Conn. “We have two ways to do it, basically.”
“The great thing about ‘Between the Scenes’ is that there’s no time limit. There’s no expectation. We can put out one that’s 10 minutes one week, and one that’s two or three minutes the next,” adds Flanz. “That’s the great thing about having the linear show, which boxes us into these times, which we’re really strict about regarding which jokes get on and what we’re covering. And then there’s ‘Between the Scenes,’ which is nice to have because of the flexibility to just put out the best stuff right then and decide after the fact if it will go anywhere else. Even if there’s a ‘Between the Scenes’ that we think is going to be great, if it didn’t really resonate with the audience, we drop it. There’s no expectation.”
Then again, with an Emmy win and a second nomination, it’s fair to say that “Between the Scenes” is generating an expectation among The Daily Show fans. So much, in fact, that the producers admit that they’re regularly asked by people outside the show about things Noah may have said in an online-only segment, but not on the show itself.
“We’ve heard some of our fans think ‘Between the Scenes’ is the show,” says Flanz. “People stop me on the street and ask, ‘What was the thing you did on the show?’ And it’s almost always something from ‘Between the Scenes.’ People think it’s from the show, but it’s a different thing. We’re always looking for new ways to bring Trevor’s voice to the audience, and that is such a great way to do that. It’s a more casual version of Trevor, and I really do think it resonates with people.”
‘The Daily Show’ returns with new episodes on Tuesday, September 4th.
