January 15, 2010 | Rants,celebrities,lists

Well it’s all over but the chants of “You suck Jay” and “We want Coco” – Jay Leno will return to host The Tonight Show, yet another decisive victory in his long, extremely successful campaign championing mediocrity in comedy.

In 1992, in a move that riled both the previous host, Johnny Carson, and anyone with a sense of humor who had not been somehow decisively thwarted in life, Jay Leno won The Tonight Show spot over the far funnier, innovative legend of Late Night, David Letterman.

Leno then spent years upsetting anyone who made the mistake of turning on the television during a commercial break, figuring it had been tuned into Letterman and then getting into bed only to have the Chin appear on the screen and realizing too late that the remote was out of arm’s reach. His show was popular among the lowest common denominator of comedy fans, which also meant that it was hugely successful for a number of years since a surprisingly huge number of people embrace crap.

Then the hope of pre-midnight laughter on NBC arose when it was announced that Leno was going to be stepping aside for Conan O’Brien.

Often when current, big shot comedy writers talk about their formative experiences, they talk about being on one of three writing teams: SNL, Letterman, and Conan during his time at Late Night. Conan wrote some of The Simpsons all-time best episodes, including a Shark Guy favorite, “Marge Versus The Monorail”, and he actually improved upon what had up to that point been the funniest franchise in late night talk show history, “Late Night With David Letterman”, with his team’s own hilarious sketches, top among them Triumph The Insult Comic Dog, and the Masturbating Bear.

The first week of the Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien contained more fresh ideas and innovative comedy than any single year of the show under Jay Leno. It seemed that Team Coco was going to extend and improve upon The Tonight Show franchise just as it had done with Late Night. Admittedly, this was far easier to do as it was building from the ground up comedy-wise with The Tonight Show, but still, all positive up to that point.

Of course, rather than fading into an endless succession of Las Vegas stand-up dates playing to rooms full of lobotomized people, Jay Leno announced that he was going to move to 10pm, which he called the “new 11.30pm”. He did the impossible and managed to produce a program that was even more derivative and uninspired than his Tonight Show.

Leno might have been stroking that big chin of his when he made this decision, as it turned out to be a crafty one. The Jay Leno show comprised lame skits, monologues so bad they almost seemed antagonistic, and set pieces that made one wonder if the writer’s strike had really ended. Much good humor had already been sucked out of the world by the time 11.35pm came on and The Tonight Show began.

For Conan, following the Jay Leno show was like being thrown out of an airplane with a 200-pound weight on your back instead of a parachute. As Leno himself said in this interview when justifying why his own show was tanking at 10pm.: “Lead-ins are important. On the nights when we have a strong lead-in, we are competitive; on the nights we don’t, it’s up to us to try and carry the ball ourselves….”

To salvage the wreck of the Jay Leno Show debacle, NBC decided to give Leno back his 11.35pm slot, perhaps reasoning that it would be impossible for Leno to decimate his own audience by leading into his own show. After a few disingenuous jokes about how he had been “fired again”, Leno accepted the offer, undoubtedly thrilled to steer the Tonight Show franchise back on the path of unchallenging mediocrity that he has long championed.

Below we have identified five traits that we find particularly irksome about Jay Leno. This is by no means a definitive list — we make no mention of Leno’s band leader, Kevin Eubanks, the most uncharismatic man on television — but here are The Five Most Annoying Things About Jay Leno.

5. Shameless Corporate Shill

Network television is run by ads, so anyone on it can be dubbed a corporate shill, but there’s a way to handle that without seeming like the president of the local chapter of the Big Industrial Pollute, Fatten and Stupefy fan club.

The late comedian Bill Hicks once admired Leno, but grew disillusioned when he saw Leno on TV stuffing Doritos in his gob for cash.

This from Alternative Reel’s Top Hicks quotes:

“Selling Doritos on TV? What a fuckin’ whore. And not even when he needed the money either, you know? If you’re a young actor, I’ll look the other way, but the guy makes $3 million a year, he decides to hock Doritos to make more money. You don’t got enough money you fucking whore? You’ve got to sell snacks to bovine America now? It’s Satan fucking him in the ass on national TV man . . . fuck . . .”

To this day, Leno is no stranger to sucking at the teat of Corporate America, as this compilation from a September episode of his terrible recent foray into prime time makes clear.

4. But Says He’s Not in it for the money

It’s one thing to prostitute your creative output in the pursuit of filthy lucre. We can understand that, and we too like our lucre, the filthier the better. But Leno claims he’s not in it for the money.

He told Rolling Stone:

Showbiz is not that hard. People make it difficult. The problem starts when you have to have all the money. I don’t need all the money. I’ve said this a million times, and it’s clichéd, but I’ve never touched a dime of TV money. I put it in the bank and live off the money I make as a stand-up comedian. That keeps me honest.

If the money isn’t important to him, and he doesn’t give a crap about doing anything worthwhile in comedy, then why does he insist on continuing with the show?

3. His Nice Guy Shtick

Mention Jay Leno and the most common response you get even from those who would rather watch their own open-heart surgery in the OR is that he seems like a really nice guy.

First, who cares if he’s a friendly guy in real life, and tips generously at places with valet parking? Overly talkative people on the bus are often quite amiable, but we wouldn’t want to listen to them deliver monologues after the news, especially if the experience is not preferable to discount root canal at the dental college. But more importantly and as recent events make perfectly clear: he’s not that nice. Leno undermined Conan with his lousy lead-in show, and even went so far as to say in an interview that he would be happy to take up the reins at 11.35pm again “if [NBC] wanted it”. He said that before anyone suggested that NBC might return him to his old slot, and was basically implying that he’d happily knock Conan out of the position if given the opportunity.

Leno denied having any such ambitions in his Rolling Stone interview: “I said, ‘Guys, whatever you want to do.’ I’ve never been one of these guys that breaks up with a girl and goes, ‘But why? If I do this, will you go out with me?’ I’m more like, ‘Babe, if you don’t want to see me, I’m gone. It’s over. Thank you.’ ”

Actually, he’s more like the passive aggressive guy who gets dumped and then waits for the right moment when his ex is either drunk or suffering from low self-esteem to sweep in and get a leg-over.

2. Horrendous Monologue Jokes

Also in his interview with Rolling Stone, Leno lists extending the monologue from 3-4 minutes to 14 as one of his innovations during his time at The Tonight Show. Since his monologues elicit more groans than recent gunshot wounds, this hardly seems like an innovation worth bragging about.

If these zingers from recent episodes of the Jay Leno show are any indication, he could have extended the monologue to PBS Pledge Drive drive proportion and not registered an increase in funny material:

(on the link between hemorrhoids and marijuana):
“Talk about a doubie up your bootie!” -Jay Leno

“Well, it’s growing more and more likely that California will legalize marijuana. You mean it’s not already legal?” –Jay Leno

“Well of course, the big political story, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid got himself in hot water during the election, when he described Barack Obama as a ‘light-skinned’ African-American ‘with no negro dialect.’ See, that may explain why Reid was the Senate majority leader and not the Senate minority leader.” –Jay Leno.

1. He was funny once

It may seem shocking, but Jay Leno was actually funny once. As Patton Oswalt noted in this Comedy Death Ray segment, Jay Leno’s current incarnation is all the more disappointing because at one time capable of producing great comedy.

Here, in a segment from Late Night With David Letterman, Leno does a bit on hackneyed comedy, and it seems a shame that he would go on to become synonymous with just that.

One Response | TrackBack URL | Comments Feed

1. 
   At 1:20 pm Brandon said:

   NBC has certainly lowered their standards since Johnny. It appears they just “settled” with jay. brandon

   Reply