NEW YORK, April 24 — Though he is new to the job of hosting a late-night show, Anthony Atamanuik has already begun stocking his office with creature comforts: an Xbox, a Nespresso machine, bottles of bourbon. His favourite perk, however, may be the wooden lectern where he dictates monologues as President Donald Trump, the character he plays on The President Show, a new weekly Comedy Central programme that makes its debut on Thursday.

“I feel most comfortable when I’m standing there,” Atamanuik said. “I rewrite in his voice.”

On Wednesday morning, Atamanuik, 42, a gregarious improvisational comedian, was in this setting at the Manhattan offices of The President Show, revising a script with some of his staff members.

The theme of this unaired test show was mothers, particularly Trump’s relationship with his mother, Mary (who recurred throughout the show as a testy disembodied voice only he can hear). For the show’s closing segment, Atamanuik imagined a homage to Psycho, where his Trump character would sit silently, wearing his mother’s wig and shawl, while her disapproving voice berated him in his mind.

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Jason Ross, one of his executive producers, wasn’t certain the scene would get big laughs. “There are no hard jokes,” said Ross, a Daily Show alumnus. “It’ll be quiet all the way through.”

Imbued, perhaps, with the spirit of the man he imitates for a living, Atamanuik pushed back. “I might be totally wrong,” he said, “but I just made an impassioned case for it. Tell me why I’m wrong.”

The President Show, which will follow Trevor Noah’s Daily Show on Thursdays, is an unusual offering, even for Comedy Central, the ancestral home of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

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Anthony Atamanuik as President Donald Trump and Peter Grosz as Vice President Mike Pence in ‘The President Show’, in New York April 19, 2017. — Picture by Hilary Swift/The New York Times
Anthony Atamanuik as President Donald Trump and Peter Grosz as Vice President Mike Pence in ‘The President Show’, in New York April 19, 2017. — Picture by Hilary Swift/The New York Times

Its premise is that Trump is the host of his own late-night programme, where he delivers his opening monologue as if it were a news conference, and interviews guests from the Oval Office while bantering with his sidekick, Vice President Mike Pence (played by Peter Grosz of Veep).

While many other late-night programmes have their own recurring Trump impressionists — Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live; Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight ShowThe President Show will test whether audiences want to spend a whole half-hour with a satirical deconstruction of the commander in chief.

It is also a momentous opportunity for Atamanuik, a veteran of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater who has appeared on 30 Rock and Broad City but has never starred in or been at the creative heart of his own TV series.

“Whatever it yields, and you have no control over it, I’m happy that this happened now for me,” Atamanuik said, trying to stay sanguine.

But, he added: “I’ve worked a lot of jobs. I’ve been a restaurant manager before. That’s where I’m taking my boss skills from.”

Anthony Atamanuik as President Donald Trump in ‘The President Show’, in New York April 19, 2017. — Picture by Hilary Swift/The New York Times
Anthony Atamanuik as President Donald Trump in ‘The President Show’, in New York April 19, 2017. — Picture by Hilary Swift/The New York Times

Atamanuik, who grew up in Chelsea, Massachusetts, has a personal Trump side that is not hard to tap into. He walks the halls of his offices (previously home to The Colbert Report and The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore) humming Hail to the Chief. He can be a bit of a name-dropper; a bit highhanded; a bit discursive — none of which Atamanuik denies.

Asked how he approached playing Trump, he referred to the “Jungian shadow,” which he described as “the part of me that I don’t want the world to see, but that I’m showing all the time.”

“I want to have a relationship with that shadow, and understand it, as opposed to rejecting it,” he explained.

Atamanuik also compared himself to Dustin Hoffman’s character in Tootsie. “I was an out-of-work actor who couldn’t get hired as himself,” he said. “So I put on a red wig and now I’m on TV.”

Before an audience of the programme’s writers and producers, Atamanuik delivered his mum-centred opening remarks (“I put her in one of my great apartment complexes,” he said in a familiar, adenoidal voice. “I call it my mother complex, and it still exists to this day”), and played a scene, inspired by Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood, in which Trump visits the puppet-filled Land of Fake-Believe.

He also got to perform his closing monologue more or less as he’d envisioned it, in black and white, wearing a wig and shawl, grinning a Norman Bates grin, while the voice of his mother says he “wouldn’t even harm a fly.”

When that scene got the laughter that Atamanuik had hoped for, he proudly stormed off the stage with mock imperiousness.

“This isn’t a discussion,” he jokingly declared. “It’s what I want to do.” — The New York Times