The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [66]
Well, pure television to me is also immediacy. That’s why I don’t like to do The Tonight Show a week or two in advance, like a lot of shows do. I like to be able to go out tonight and talk about what’s happening today. So the immediacy of doing this kind of show, I think, has a certain value in it. People know it’s happening right now.
Sure, we’re delayed on tape, but we don’t edit the show; we don’t shoot two hours and edit it down. When Saturday Night Live says, “Live, from New York!” it’s live in the East but it’s not live out here. Doing it the same day on tape is exactly the same thing as doing it live.
In both programs there’s also the element of risk.
And I think that’s a part of pure television. We don’t know on any given night how it’s going to go. You get an immediate feedback from the audience on what you’ve done, and if it all falls together, it’s a great feeling. If you’ve had troubles, you say, “Okay, there’s tomorrow night.” Every night cannot be a winner.
You don’t stop the tape even when people are being off-color or whatever. You might bleep it out, but people can see that things were getting out of hand.
Yeah, I think there’s that aura of “What’s going to happen? How are they going to get out of this? This is not going well.” That, to me, is what television started out to be. Now, mainly, it’s a device for screening movies or situation comedies with canned laughter. And The Tonight Show, or shows like it, I think—if they all went off the air, it would be too bad for television.
Critics have said that you have a schoolboy quality, a puckishness that isn’t seen too often on TV.
[Intrigued] I suppose that’s only because of the face. I’ve never had a particularly old-looking face. Even when I was thirty or thirty-five, I looked like I was twenty-five. That may be changing rapidly now. But if I looked different, you probably wouldn’t have that attitude. Or maybe it’s because I was born in the Midwest; you know, Mel Brooks calls me “SuperGentile,” “SuperWASP,” and maybe it’s that particular look, but that’s just what I am.
You have become—and this is just a fact—so much a part of this culture. If you weren’t there, I suspect there would be a real gap.
[Long pause] That’s flattering. I think one of the things is that we’re about the only show that does day-to-day humor. There’s no other show that does it. Saturday Night Live is on three times a month; they do sketches. The monologue, for example, to me is a very integral part of the show. Being out there every night, it’s the only show that I know of on television where anybody is commenting on what’s going on in the country every single day.
But why do you think people feel so comfortable with you?
I can’t analyze that. I really can’t. I just do what I do. People ask me, “How do you analyze that you’ve stayed on seventeen years and the competition has dropped off?” See, either way you answer that, you end up sounding like a schmuck.
If you say, “Well, obviously I do a much better job than they do,” or say, “I’m more talented,” then people say, “You egotistical bastard!”
If, on the other hand, you play Harry Humble and say, “Gee, I don’t know,” then that sounds idiotic, too. So no matter what you say, people say, “Aw, come on now.”
I don’t try to shoot for an average audience. I do the things I like to do, and I think I’ve learned what people will accept from me. That’s just an intuitive thing.
There’s an axiom that most comedians—a variation on the sad clown thing—are very intense and self-absorbed.
There’s a certain amount of truth in that. A lot of comedians are introspective, not the “sad clown” syndrome exactly; it’s more like the myth “to be funny, you must have suffered.” You must have been raised on the Lower East Side, and you must have fought your way out of this deprivation to be funny. That’s not really true. Do you have to starve,