Leno’s Last Laugh
by Kathy Shaidle
Yes, there really is a Burbank.
As a kid, I assumed that the smallish California city with the “beautiful downtown” was just a cheesy Tonight Show punch line, not a real place.
Today, all is not well in the “Media Capital of the World.” Its legendary aviation industry almost extinct, Burbank relies on its equally famous TV studios to stay solvent.
That’s why city fathers panicked when NBC announced The Tonight Show‘s move back to New York City when Jimmy Fallon takes over from Jay Leno next February. That means the loss of about 170 jobs in a city of just 100,000, plus the revenue from all the tourists who’ve trekked to Burbank since 1972 to be part of the show’s live audience.
The mayor jokingly threatened a hunger strike. Petitions were signed.
But those grassroots efforts couldn’t trump the so-called “Jimmy Fallon tax credit,” a line item in New York State’s latest budget that was clearly designed to lure The Tonight Show back to its original Rockefeller Center home.
So strange. Despite the trappings of 21st-century technology—you can practically hear the cell phones buzzing and keyboards clicking—this high-stakes bicoastal maneuvering seems absurdly quaint, like Civil War reenactments but with lawyers.
After all, The Tonight Show‘s importance in the entertainment economy and in popular culture has steeply declined since its iconic host Johnny Carson retired over twenty years ago. . . .
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Steve Allen and Jack Paar were both very funny, and had such different personalities. Dick Cavett wrote for Paar and later did some very memorable shows of his own. Like Paar, his show had a hint of danger, as far as the unexpected and you'd wait for the clever sparkling quip. I've earlier criticized Cavett and so will now keep my mouth shut.
Letterman was funnier way back in the afternoons when he had his troupe of very fine players, which he sometimes treated like cardboard cutouts. When I watched him later at night, he would often do purposely boorish things, like repeatedly clearing his throat until the audience finally laughed or applauded, which I figured I could enjoy just as well randomly observing customers at Walmart. O'Brien was supposedly this edgy guy with a kind of crazy streak who was way too deep and brilliantly wacky for slug-like Leno viewers, but, while I liked O'Brien’s persona, it seemed that most of the qualities trumpeted by the media were mostly in his style and attitude, but not enough of it made it into his actual written material, a pity.
I guess it was Andy Warhol who said that the great thing about watching Johnny Carson was that you never had to feel embarrassed for him, which was pretty much true. You were in the hands of the Master, although even he reportedly agreed that he was terrible when he started hosting, providing hope to anyone new on the job. I think Carson's supposedly shark-like coldness was a bit exaggerated by critics because he was a very private person and did not need that much in further adulation fixes outside of his show or after he retired. The friends that he cut off, at least in the case of Rivers and his lawyer, seemed to have been for understandable reasons.
Yes, in those days television hosts were actually allowed to bomb when telling a joke without the studio intervening with bells and whistles to mask an audience's embarrassing silences. Carson had so many funny ways to come back after a joke bombed that sometimes I suspected him of purposely telling an iffy joke just so he could show his dexterity by pulling out of a disastrous dive and getting a big comeback laugh or applause.
Yes again, as someone else remarked, Ed McMahon never got enough credit. It is impossible to imagine Carson without him. Loved it when Ed would do that bit involving his overly long intro to Carson’s ‘The Great Karnak’ that would always end with, or something close to, “The all seeing, the all knowing, if borderline, Great Karnak!’ with Carson/Karnak always turning his head with a brief suspicious-disturbed reaction, then moving quickly on. Funny every single time they did it!
Chronologically through Carson, amazingly, late night comedy talk shows would routinely have important serious authors on as guests. They might come on last, but at least they had them on. Today it would definitely be Carrot Top over Tolstoy. Don't watch the newer hosts. Did see Fallon’s monologue his first big night hosting his current show and remember thinking, 'THESE are the best jokes he could come up with after all the time he had to prepare for his big debut?'
All very subjective, but to me Leno was the funniest of his generation of hosts. Besides that, one of my favorite things about Jay was that he told countless jokes about the throngs of illegals invading LA and California. Hard to imagine a more unwelcome un-PC line of comedy from a major comic as he is surrounded by Hollywood's glittering off-planet Cultural Marxist celebrity culture. Such American-majority qualities were probably a big reason why so many ultra-sophisticated TV critics tended to groan at each mention of Leno and run puff pieces on others they imagined were deeply creative imaginative hilarious liberal thinkers.
Thanks Jay.
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