Colbert Is Still On The Right

Stephen Colbert has been hosting The Late Show for a couple of weeks now. It's been a little slow, but you to have patience. I had heard that he was trying to break with tradition by arranging his studio the opposite of Letterman's, with the band on the right, and the desk/sofa where the interviews take place on the left.

That brings up a question I've had for a while about talk shows: while he was willing to change much of the stage set-up, there was one thing he didn't mess with: keeping the guests on the left side of the screen, and the host on the right. Carson, Letterman, Leno, Conan, Stewart, Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Ellen, Latifah, O'Donnell, Hall: it's the same with all of them. Apparently even Steve Allen and Jack Paar sat on the right. Larry King's show on CNN was the other way around, but we all know he's immune to the rules that limit us mortals.

I looked it up on the Internet and people had detailed explanations, often revolving around the fact that we read from left to right. You'd think that would put it the other way round, with the person asking questions on the left and the answerer on the right, but whatever. Apparently this is the explanation for well-established theatre traditions, and the talk show set up is only the latest manifestation of it. I assume talk shows in the Arab world have the seating reversed. And in China, the host sits on stage and interviews celebrities in the balcony.

But there's a problem with this explanation: the one exception of today is James Corden, on after Colbert. He not only sits on the left, but he doesn't have a desk, and brings out all his guests at once instead of one at a time. None of this is because he's some sort of talk show maverick, but because he's British, and that's the way they do it over there. That punctures any ideas that it's about the way we think or the way we read. If anything, it could only be related to the way we drive.  And now that I look it up, I find that Egyptian talk show host Bassem Youssef used the traditional American way too; and the Arab world drives on the right.

This apparently meaningless tradition also calls into question other psycho-lateral explanations for behaviour. There's a popular idea that you can tell a person is lying if they look to the right, even though that's provably false. There's also a lot of reasoning I've heard about how things are placed in stores to make them more appealing by making people approach them from more favourable sides. Like they'd prefer to have you walk past display so the merchandise is on your right, so a right-hander is more likely to pick it up, and this more likely to buy it. While subtle things can make a difference, I've always been sceptical of this ideas that people are like toddlers at the grabby stage, whom we can manipulate into zombie-like automatic purchases. I suspect all of it is pseudo-science driven by people's desperation for easy explanations to complex situations, combined with self-appointed experts using the Emperor's New Clothes to maintain their air of authority.