David Spade’s New Comedy Central Late Night Show Will Still Have Opinions—Just Not About Trump

Comedian David Spade became famous in American households mostly for, well, being mean.

Some of his most infamous sketches during his tenure on NBC’s Saturday Night Live in the 1990s included characters like a flight attendant with no time for pleasantries during disembarkment and a self-important Gap salesgirl that, quite honestly, was instrumental in convincing an impressionable teen-aged me that the clothing options at this mall staple were only suitable for my junior high classmates that defined whatever was the early ‘90s equivalent of “basic.” His character of Dennis Finch on the long-running NBC sitcom Just Shoot Me! was a horndog, yes, but he could also dredge up enough snark to embody the inner monologues of many an assistant at a fashion magazine.

But it was his skewering of celebrities where Spade really shone. Even then-child actor Macaulay Culkin wasn’t immune to his Hollywood Minute segments that aired as part of SNL’s Weekend Update (in that one, Culkin was reminded that Spade, too, was once a cute young blonde kid. And then he got old). He eventually transitioned this banter to his eponymous Comedy Central series, The Showbiz Show with David Spade, in the mid ‘00s. There, his zingers and one-liners were salty take-downs of entertainment news at a time when our culture was becoming inundated with a constant entertainment news cycle, and as the very definition of “celebrity” was quickly expanding thanks to people like Paris Hilton and publications like the rebranded Us Weekly and the launch of TMZ.

Spade’s ability to tell stories about mortals and famous people alike, which all come with just the right balance of sauce, has made him a go-to guest for everyone from Jimmy Kimmel to Ellen DeGeneres to Howard Stern. So it isn’t really a wonder that he’ll be at it again in a televised format for his new weekly late-night show Comedy Central show Lights Out with David Spade, which premieres July 29.

“The core would be three comedians—three funny people—on every day just to bullshit,” Spade says of the Lights Out format when we spoke during a Los Angeles press junket earlier this year, where he was, for all intents and purposes, nice. These topics could include things like “gender reveal [parties] or anything that’s funny to me [because] I think it’s stupid.”

Sitting in a hotel room chair in skinny jeans and a black, long-sleeved button down, he spent the majority of the interview with his legs tucked underneath him as he balances on his knees and says things like that the format might be shifted if they book “a mega star.” In this case, “we either put them in a field piece, or we bring them in the studio to read maybe their celebrity DMs” from their social media accounts.

Or these people could end up sitting with Spade and his gang, but they’d be given different colored chairs because they’re there as a favor—just as he’s done on so many other occasions.

He knows that the best way for a show with his own name in it to succeed is for him to be an integral part of the bits and interviews, either as himself or as one of his famous characters. But he says he’s not above looking at the storyboard and deciding “what if Chris Rock did this? Or what if Norm MacDonald co-hosted but he’s on FaceTime?” and then making a call.

“We try to think of weirder things that might be funny,” Spade says, as well as a necessary evil in this crowded late-night landscape of strategizing “what segments can go viral the next day on YouTube.”