Well, it’s finally happened. After five weeks on confinement, I’ve had a revelation. Here goes: I think – I think – there’s a possibility that our favourite TV hosts... might not actually be that funny.

I know – the shock, the horror! Believe me, as someone who moved to America almost six years ago with nothing but wide-eyed admiration for the nation’s most prominent comedians, I do not make this assertion lightly. If anything, trying to articulate my thoughts on the matter has left me teetering on the edge of a full-blown identity crisis.

Humor has rarely been as essential, in my experience, as it is now. Laughing for 20 uninterrupted minutes at a tweet about 700 cows used to be an indulgence – now, it’s a lifeline. It’s the difference between going to bed weighed down by anxiety or coddled by a fleeting twinge of levity. Laughter is a way to connect with loved ones near and far, at a time when social distancing and the pressures of isolation can make it difficult to see eye-to-eye.

And so, as our favourite TV hosts scrambled to adapt to our new – admittedly very stressful, scary and uncomfortable – circumstances, I kept watching. At first, some late shows such as Stephen Colbert’s and Jimmy Fallon’s kept taping in their usual studios, only without an audience. Then, when even that option became unsustainable, our TV icons did the only reasonable thing: they started taping from home.

Watching the same familiar faces, whose bonhomie and apparent wit and overall likeability have been deemed worth millions of dollars, essentially reduced to the same production conditions as well-to-do YouTubers has been... quite something.

Nothing exemplifies this moment in time more than a recent clip put out by The Ellen DeGeneres Show (admittedly not a late show, but an entertainment behemoth nonetheless) in which DeGeneres, sitting cross-legged on a chair inside her beautiful home overlooking a lush garden, jokingly compares coronavirus confinement to being in jail. The joke was met with a backlash on social media – understandably so, at a time when inmates face increased risks amid the Covid-19 pandemic. (Fifty-seven correctional officers, inmates, and relatives recently sounded the alarm in correspondence with The Washington Post.)

Perhaps the insensitivity of DeGeneres’s zinger was magnified by the silence that immediately followed it. The only laughter was DeGeneres’s own. This is the new “if a tree falls in a forest” conundrum: if you make a joke and no one’s around to laugh with you, is there any chance the zinger will actually land?

This stripped-down version of television is also more unforgiving. Earlier this month, Stephen Colbert, while delivering a monologue from his home, gave his dog Benny an almost two-minute cameo. Analysing my own feelings about this particular segment has required me to look deep, deep into the darkest confines of my soul, because I love Stephen Colbert and I love dogs, and perhaps the only thing I love more than Stephen Colbert is dogs. Which is why I was initially enthralled when Colbert, not unlike my coworkers on Zoom, invited his pet into his professional environment for a bit of camera time.

Colbert fed his dog a slice of ham, and I was happy (well, the strange kind of “happy” that I’ve been able to attain at brief intervals lately). Then, Colbert fed Benny a second slice of ham, and I thought that was fair enough – we all deserve extra treats right now. It was around the third and fourth slices of ham that I tuned out and wondered out loud: “Did I just watch Stephen Colbert feed his dog ham for almost two minutes of my life?”

I have no bone to pick (pun intended) with Benny, Colbert, or any specific late-night personality, really. This segment was sweet and absurd in a way that is rapidly becoming familiar. In that moment, Colbert wasn’t the late-night idol we know him as – he was just a man, kneeling down in his home office, feeding ham to his dog. That had to be good enough, and in a strange way, it sort of was.

This reminds me of the state of late-night TV after Donald Trump’s presidential victory. For a while, hosts seemed unsure of how to respond, mainly trying their hands at more-or-less funny, and more-or-less annoying, impersonations of the 45th President of the United States. The world of late night struggled to adapt, in part because a key part of its brand resides in being irreverent and too cool to care, but the times didn’t lend themselves to not caring. It's the same during coronavirus — how to be funny, or relatable, when you're a millionaire and everyone's locked in their homes attempting to avoid a deadly infection?

We know TV personalities, just like the rest of us, are only trying to adapt to the times. And it’s not necessarily that Colbert, Fallon, DeGeneres et al aren’t funny as people – indisputably, they are — but the lesson here is that it’s much, much harder to be funny alone. If confinement has taught us anything about comedy on TV, it’s that our favourite shows are collective illusions that can only happen when a lot of people work together to make them come to life. There’s lighting and music and crowds. There are writers and producers and more.