Skip to content

Macleans.ca

Canada’s magazine

Tag Archives: Conan O’Brien

Christmas, through a comedian’s dark lens

Plus: Walter Mosley’s latest, a biography of the Atlantic Ocean, the father of modern taxidermy, what Boomers can expect from the rest of life, and the late night TV wars

Leno and His Joke Obsession

I’ll have more to say later about Bill Carter’s The War For Late Night (aka Late Shift 2: The Shiftening), but one thing I wanted to remark on quickly is that although the book doesn’t do much to delve into the mysteries of why these people are the way they are — Carter got to talk to everybody, but the price for that is that he’s too close to provide a really hard-hitting portrayal of anybody — there are some bits that help clarify the mystery of why Jay Leno, a comedian whose talent no one doubts, has been such a creatively mediocre host. The book keeps repeating his mantra that what he wants to do is “tell jokes at 11:35 at night”; every time he talks about what he does, he says that his job is to “tell jokes.” Carter reminds us that Leno said, comparing himself and Letterman, “I’m a comedian, I’m not a talk-show host. I think Dave as a broadcaster is as good as there has ever been. I would say Dave is the better broadcaster and I am the better stand-up comedian.” That sounds about right. As I said,  the people who disrespect Leno don’t deny that he was a good stand-up — even Bill Hicks’ vicious routine about Leno’s Tonight Show was premised on the idea that Leno used to be funny and chose to stop being funny.

Deliberately Inaccurate Parodies

I’m not going to comment on Conan at any length for a while (I’ll probably come back to it in a few weeks, pick a random episode, and see what he’s doing differently, if anything), but I did want to say one thing about a bit last night, where O’Brien brought on SNL’s Will Forte playing TBS’s founder, Ted Turner. It’s normal for a talk show to have parodies of famous people. The thing about Forte’s Turner, though, is that it was absolutely nothing like Ted Turner at all. Instead it was a fantasy version of Turner, taking one or two things that are known about the guy (he’s rich, he’s Southern) and building a stock character, the macho rich Southern guy, out of that. It’s not like an SNL celebrity parody, where the usual m.o. is to find some trait the public associates with the famous person and then exaggerate it; Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford was nothing like Gerald Ford, but he was based on the public perception of Ford as a clumsy guy. But Turner’s public persona is that of the liberal rich guy who wants to use his money to save the planet, and Forte played him as Yosemite Sam.