Standing for Nothing

A lot of us have asked ourselves when it started.

This slow slide into whatever the hell version of reality we’re trapped in now. If you’re an adherent to “the worst timeline” type thing, it’s easy to see the butterfly’s wings in motion back when that blue/black/white/gold dress captivated the nation. Or maybe it was the day Harambe took a bullet for a kid whose parents lost track of him at the zoo.

Me? I’ve always thought it was the moment NBC handed The Tonight Show—Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show—not to his heir apparent, the generational talent sitting behind the desk over at Late Night, but to the guy who was best known to television audiences for promoting Doritos while laying the groundwork for the progenitorily thumb-faced American everyman archetype: Jay Leno.

And now, all these years later, CBS has canceled The Late Show. Not made a time slot change, not moved the show to Burbank, not replaced the host. They nuked the entire institution. The same network that fought tooth and nail to build a show for Letterman after he was jerked around over at NBC just threw his legacy in a ditch because Donald Trump didn’t like the jokes Stephen Colbert was telling.

Dave had thoughts. 

“This is gutless,” he said. “Pure cowardice. They did not do the correct thing.” And he’s right. CBS didn’t just mishandle a host—they folded like they were facing Foreman in Kingston. Make no mistake; this isn’t a strategic change to the programming schedule. It’s capitulation.

Enter Jay.

Jay Leno, who’s never seen a fence so narrow he couldn’t comfortably straddle, took the unprovoked opportunity to give the same warmed-over take he’s been microwaving up since the mid-1990s. His advice is that late-night TV comedians should avoid being too political. “To me,” he said, “I like to think that people come to a comedy show to kind of get away from things, you know, the pressures of life, whatever it might be.”

“I love political humor, don’t get me wrong,” he continued, presumably moving his head just a little too much, “But it’s just what happens when people wind up cozying too much to one side or the other…Why shoot for just half an audience all the time? You know, why not try to get the whole. I mean, I like to bring people into the big picture.”

An aside, gentle reader, to remind you that when Leno was at the helm of the Tonight Show, the "big picture" consisted of something like 450 Clinton/Lewinsky/fellatio jokes. It was relentless. Every night. For years. That was Jay’s apolitical center. That was his vision. A comedy landscape where every setup ended with a cigar, cum (and I do mean cum) punchline. It wasn’t brave. It wasn’t balanced. It was lazy.

What’s sad here is that Jay Leno used to matter. Once upon a time—pre-Tonight Show, pre-Doritos—he was a comic’s comic. Fast, original, and dangerous in the best way. But when the spotlight came calling, he traded sharp for safe, edge for access, mattering for money. He chose the suits.

And I’m not even going to touch on how fucked up Leno was for passing the torch to and then snatching the torch from Conan O’Brien, ensuring the eventual fate of The Tonight Show would be in the equally obsequious hands of fun-but-not-funny Jimmy Fallon. Under Johnny Carson, The Tonight Show was a bellwether of American culture writ large. In a post-Leno television universe, it is impotent, immaterial, and unimportant. If Leno had his way, that’s what late-night comedy would look like.

Jay Leno could be in his thirteenth garage right now, lovingly polishing his McLaren or whatever. Or doing what he usually does, wrecking enough cars to make Richard Hammond look like an agoraphobic shut in.  But instead, he’s still out here playing both sides of a game he already quit. Still chasing applause from a room full of humorless execs who don't even sign his checks. Still proving that even with no skin in the game, he can't resist being a milquetoast, glad-handing, limp-dicked corporate shill.

So yeah. I’ll always be a Letterman guy.