‘Seth Meyers: Dad Man Walking’ Is, In Fact, A Bunch of Dad Jokes (Complimentary)

In Seth Meyers’ new HBO special, Dad Man Walking, his opener is a very good poop joke, which he graciously credits to his son Axel, (fittingly) #2 among Meyers’s three children. Meyers gets to his own material shortly after that, though. “I am going to talk a fair amount about having kids tonight,” he warns his audience, “and I appreciate that not everyone here is a parent. We do have a pretty cool consolation prize for you, which is this: at the end of the night, you all get to go back to a home where no fucking kids live.” 

It’s a remarkably efficient joke considering that it doubles as a load-bearing bit: Yes, children are a significant focus of his attention, but no, he’s not the kind of dad comic who thinks everything they do is adorable. In other words, fans who seek out Meyers’ stand-up because they’re hooked on the topical material he does four nights a week as the host of NBC’s Late Night shouldn’t worry that they’re about to get pummeled with dad jokes (derogatory). The special helps define Meyers’ stage persona as a likable family man with an edge.

Though Meyers made his name making comedy out of current events as a head writer and Weekend Update anchor on Saturday Night Live, he’s also been an executive producer on some of this century’s most idiosyncratic comedy projects, and each title is a testament to his discerning taste. To name just a few, there’s Mapleworth Murders, a queer Murder, She Wrote that became a casualty of Quibi’s implosion; Documentary Now! (which he co-created and writes on), crafting note-perfect spoofs of venerable non-fiction films; and the joke-dense A.P. Bio, about the revenge plots of a high school teacher who’s even more misanthropic than the usual high school teacher baseline. 

Five years into his run as the host of Late Night, Meyers expanded his comic reach even further by dropping his first standup special on Netflix. Lobby Baby is, among other things, about the titular baby, to whom Meyers’ wife Alexi gave birth in the also titular lobby of their apartment building. Like most shows in the genre, Late Night trucks in goofs on the news and absurdist sketches; if it reveals anything about Meyers’ real life, it’s generally in an aside. Lobby Baby contextualized Meyers as a guy with a family — particularly, as Kathryn Van Arendonk wrote in her review at Vulture, a wife he’s obsessed with — and not just a head and torso that live behind a desk at 30 Rock.

Lobby Baby had a seven-minute chunk about then-president Donald Trump; since it was on Netflix, the technology existed to add a “SKIP POLITICS” button. Meyers told Vulture’s Megh Wright and Bethy Squires he was “aware of the risk of talking about something unique to the moment for a special that’s ideally going to live on for a while,” while also acknowledging the political environment in which the special initially arrived. Dad Man Walking doesn’t have a “SKIP POLITICS” button because it doesn’t need one. There’s a bit about his two-year-old daughter Addie being a Trump supporter, purely for economic reasons, and a brief story about all three children meeting Joe Biden when he was a guest on Late Night earlier this year. But other than that, the show is virtually all fit to “live on for a while.” 

Setting up the story about Biden’s visit, Meyers says, “I thought, you know, when’s the next time I’m going to have my kids be in a position to meet the president? And, you know, I might not want them to meet the next one.” I think we may safely assume Trump is the possible next president from whom he’d want to shield his children, and Meyers knows, more than most of his comic peers, that joking about Trump is fun until it’s not. Meyers has four hours a week on free network TV to make known his views of this year’s presidential candidates; it seems unlikely that anyone firing this up on premium pay cable 10 days before the election is unsure where Meyers stands.

Instead, this hour is about Meyers and his family, and feels, if not timeless, at least evergreen for a few more years until his children start becoming teenagers. Addie, Meyers’ youngest, is mostly spared, but her older brothers Axel and Ashe are portrayed as fighting Meyers — biting each other, or interrogating him about topics Meyers strains to care about. In fact, third on the short list of things his children are currently doing that Meyers hates is something Meyers has to take a knee to bring up: their constantly talking about lava. (“I blame the school.”) 

He’d never hurt his children, but he confesses that sometimes he does whip off their sweaters as fast as he can and relish the moment the collar gets stuck on their eyelids. He admits that while he and Alexi have a different parenting style than Meyers’ own father, “an old-school screamer” who will sometimes still slide back into those habits with Meyers’ children. Part of Meyers loves for his dad to lay into them so they will appreciate how good they have it; Meyers also wonders if his own considerate permissiveness has them chatting in their bunk beds about him being a “beta cuck.”

Life with kids seems, in Meyers’ telling, like a siege from which he welcomes the briefest of respites, as when he has to retrieve dice from under the couch because the kids threw them too hard (number one on the list cited above) and just lies there for as long as he can. He later talks about his vegan brother Josh, and jokes that the logo for veganism should be someone skeptically reading a food label; the logo for parenting should be a dad prone on the floor, pretending to grope for dice he’s already holding. 

All of this will, I’m sure, resonate with viewers who are parents themselves. As a non-parent, I’m always here for jokes that confirm the things about it that suck, but non-parents get roasted, too. A chunk about wedding invitations that include children lets Meyers go in on brides and grooms who don’t think through the obligation it imposes on those children’s parents: “Thank you, by the way, for making them wear tiny tuxedos! You don’t know this yet about kids, but their favorite thing in the world to do is go to a formalwear place while a guy tells them to stand still with pins in his mouth! Thank you for that! Thank you for the tiny tuxedos! We should have bought them because I can’t imagine that it would have been less expensive than how fucking expensive it was to rent!!!” Are his kids, in this story, hellions who ate the whole wedding cake while Meyers’s back was turned? Sure. But they’re not the real monsters in this story.

In Van Arendonk’s Lobby Baby review, linked above, she called Meyers a “Wife Guy,” and Alexi gets play here too — for being too subtle when she relays important information (“When did you tell me that?” “Monday, when I whispered it into the mailbox!”), for favoring matcha lattes because they’re hard to find, for sometimes being not just “mean” but “a lot” in a way that even her own mother nonverbally lets Meyers know she pities him for. He admits that his desire to be a good partner is sometimes at odds with his instinct to make a good joke, which is how we end with a story about Alexi trying to bring a tub of hummus through a TSA checkpoint, and Meyers’ reaction when (spoiler) she isn’t successful. It’s a hilarious sequence of partners both being jerks in completely different yet beautifully compatible ways that make you think their kids, once they stop biting each other, are going to turn out great. 

You hate to think of Meyers — in my opinion, the hands-down best of TV’s current late-night hosts — possibly needing an exit strategy if his nightly show ends, even though the portents for the genre aren’t great. But if he ends up needing a new main hustle, Dad Man Walking gives us a good idea of how that could look.