And it was his response, when Conway told him that Trump “has said that he is not aware of that”—the “that” in this case meaning, ostensibly, the briefings that were the subject of the CNN report—that the president-elect’s lack of awareness “concerns me.” It was his further response, when Conway met Meyers’s note about Trump’s apparent lack of curiosity in determining the extent of the Russian involvement in the election with “he was curious enough to figure out America”: “That’s a pivot right there, Kellyanne.” (He added: “And, by the way, no one does it better.”)

That the pair’s exchange would be contentious was, on the one hand, entirely unsurprising. Meyers, first of all, has made no secret of his (progressive) partisanship. His audience was clearly on his side in the engagement. And the questions he asked Conway took on the specificity they did in part because of the interview’s timing: The news of Trump’s being briefed about the compromising information, first reported by CNN, broke right before Late Night taped.

But Meyers also took the stance he did because of the changes that have come to late-night comedy in recent years—and, especially, within the most recent one. Late-night may once have offered an easy way for politicians to connect with people and humanize themselves in the eyes of public, via sax performances, charming discussions of pets, and the like; occasionally, it still does that.

As the lines between “politics” and “everything else” have faded, though, even the late-night couch has doubled, ever more, as a hot seat. Trevor Noah grilled the conservative pundit Tomi Lahren when she appeared on his show late last year. Samantha Bee interviewed Obama. The bookers for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert saw to it that the very first episode of their new series would feature, as Colbert’s guest, then-Republican frontrunner Jeb Bush. That Meyers would end up asking a guest to “confirm or comment” on “allegations” provided by the intelligence community was in that sense not a moment of deviation from the norms of late-night comedy; it was a perfect example of them.

And Meyers himself has also gone out of his way to emphasize the civic responsibilities of late-night comedy. As he put it during his show’s monologue the day after the 2016 presidential election, “Donald Trump made a lot of promises as to what he was going to do over the next four years, and now we get to see if he will, if he can, fulfill them. So I’d just like to make one promise to him: We here at Late Night will be watching you.”

Conway is not Trump; she is, however, a close adviser to him. And she is, furthermore, (in)famously skilled at the Sun Tzu-for-the-age-of-Hardball arts of rhetorical deflection and political spin. Softballs, because of all that—the traditional stuff of the prior age of late-night banter—simply wouldn’t have been appropriate for Meyers’s interview. And while she has been an omnipresence on cable TV—a fact that was mocked recently, and delightfully, by Meyers’s former employer—she has not been a mainstay of the late-night circuit.