Stephen Colbert and John Oliver both returned to the airwaves this week to host their late-night shows from home. So it was only fitting that the two former Daily Show alums had a video chat on Monday to discuss just how weird the entire process of producing television amid the coronavirus pandemic has been.

“Welcome to interviews in the after times,” Colbert said to Oliver on Monday's episode of The Late Show.

“It's great to be with you,” the Last Week Tonight host responded. “It's like staring into my own anxieties right now. It's such a comfort to see your face, because your eyes are also screaming what the fuck is happening?”

Colbert was the first of the late-night hosts to produce at-home content after the outbreak and enhanced social distancing recommendations forced shows across television into hiatus. But the CBS star's initial segments were distributed via YouTube and recorded in lo-fi fashion. For his return on Monday night, The Late Show was more produced, with cameras, lights, and support from his remote production staff. Likewise, Oliver's HBO show took a one-week break before returning with a new episode on Sunday night that Oliver recorded from his home, with his staff helping out via video conference. The workload, Oliver said, has rendered him relatively unavailable to learn new things while being stuck at home.

“I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old, and I'm trying to make a TV show from scratch. So there's no extra time in my day at the moment to learn Spanish or how to make a profiterole,” Oliver joked after Colbert said he was able to change the inner tube of a bicycle tire in his spare time. “That's just not happening. I'm drowning, Stephen. ... Things are not going great here. I'm not becoming better as a human being. I've learned, unfortunately, how to make a TV show on my own here with my staff over Zoom. I've basically been committing union infractions out the wazoo.”

Outside of the obvious production limitations of working from home, the biggest difference between the normal versions of Late Night and Last Week Tonight is the absence of audience response and laughter. On Monday, especially during his monologue, Colbert seemed slightly thrown off by the awkwardness of telling jokes into the void (despite previously successfully landing a number of good zingers during the ad-hoc monologues he produced on the fly a couple of weeks ago). The host asked Oliver if the lack of laughs is also an issue for him. “It's very nice to have an audience, but I started comedy doing stand-up in England. I am so completely used to delivering jokes to absolute silence and sometimes worse,” Oliver said. “So this is fine for me. It genuinely doesn't affect me at all.”