The Late Night with Seth Meyers host is joining award-winning journalist and podcast host Nayeema Raza for a special live recording of Smart Girl Dumb Questions at Comedy Cellar Village Underground on Tuesday, September 29.
It’s an unusually intimate chance to watch a late-night fixture work without the studio desk, the cue cards, or the comforting buffer of a commercial break.
The 90-minute taping promises comedy, curious conversation, live-audience energy, and perhaps a few questions from the crowd.
Better still, net ticket proceeds will go to PEN America, the nonprofit that works to defend free expression and protect writers.
Here are all the details about this exclusive chance to get in a room with one of the internet’s rising voices.
A live taping inside one of NYC’s most famous comedy rooms
There are plenty of places in New York to listen to a podcast. Your headphones on the subway. Your phone speaker while doing laundry. The line at Trader Joe’s, if you are feeling particularly committed to multitasking.
But this is happening inside the Comedy Cellar’s Village Underground, an intimate room with a deep connection to Greenwich Village’s music and comedy history.
The venue sits in the basement of the former Gerdes’ Folk City, the historic music club that helped launch and shape the careers of artists including Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Joan Baez. When the space became available in 2000, Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman and partner George Buchalter revived it as Village Underground, building it into a small, high-spec live room designed for serious performers.
It’s a proper underground setting: low-lit, close-quarters, built for the exact kind of unscripted moment that becomes much more fun when you are physically in the room for it.
Fit for only about 300 people, its an intimate spot — not an enormous theatre appearance where Seth Meyers will look approximately the size of a postage stamp from Row ZZ.
The podcast that makes room for big questions
The title may be Smart Girl Dumb Questions, but the premise is actually refreshingly simple: there is no shame in asking the thing everyone else is wondering too.
Every Tuesday, Raza digs into large, often complicated ideas by starting with the questions people are sometimes too embarrassed to say out loud.
Her guests have ranged from Neil deGrasse Tyson and Diplo to New York City doormen and sharp 11-year-olds, all in the pursuit of making modern life make a little more sense.
The approach landed and the show was named among Spotify Wrapped’s Top 10 Best New Shows of 2025, while Apple Podcasts featured it as a New and Noteworthy launch and a Top Pick in spring 2025.
Raza’s idea is that the only truly dumb thing you can be is a know-it-all.
It’s a philosophy that feels particularly useful in New York, a city where every stranger on the platform, sidewalk, and bodega line appears to have at least one aggressively confident opinion.
What Seth Meyers brings to the conversation
Meyers has spent more than a decade turning political absurdity, celebrity news, and the day’s general chaos into late-night comedy, first as head writer and “Weekend Update” anchor on Saturday Night Live, then as host of NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers.
That makes him a particularly promising fit for a show about asking big, not-always-neat questions.
He is quick enough to turn an unexpected prompt into a bit, sharp enough to find the oddity in it, and experienced enough with live television to know that the unpredictable bits are usually the ones audiences remember.
During the taping, Raza will put her questions to Meyers in real time, and organizers say there may be a brief opportunity for a handful of audience questions too.
So, arrive with a burning query, but perhaps keep it punchy. This is a live taping, not your chance to finally deliver the 14-part monologue you have been rehearsing in the shower.
Supporting PEN America
This taping carries a bigger purpose than a particularly entertaining Tuesday evening.
Net ticket proceeds are being donated to PEN America, which works to protect free expression through advocacy, research, support for writers, and public programming. The partnership gives the event an extra layer of meaning, especially in a city where journalism, publishing, comedy, and public debate all share the same crowded ecosystem.
Come for the Seth Meyers jokes and unexpected answers. Leave knowing your ticket has also supported an organisation devoted to protecting the freedom to ask difficult questions in the first place.
All of the essential details
🗓️ Tuesday, September 29, 2026, from 5 pm to 6:30 pm (doors at 4:30 pm)
📍 Comedy Cellar Village Underground, 130 West 3rd Street
❗ A two-item food-or-drink minimum applies; no late seating is permitted; early arrival is recommended for the best seating; attendees may be recorded during the live taping