The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [10]
Jay now moved on to airline jokes, drunk pilots. “Imagine the pilot comes on and you hear him say, ‘My name is Bob; I’m an alcoholic!’ Well, thank you, Bob!” He punched the last line, raising his voice a decibel to sell the joke harder, one of his best-honed techniques. Jay could always modulate his voice to underscore a line and almost force a laugh. He had learned the skill long ago in the clubs, and his peers considered him a master at it.
But longtime Jay observers in the audience and among the comics backstage sensed something amiss. It was all coming too frantically; Jay seemed to be rushing, stepping on his own laughs. One top NBC official noticed with some alarm that Jay’s brow was coated with sweat, and he looked heavier than many New York-based executives remembered him. And the hand constantly thrusting through his hair . . . It all seemed slightly manic, not at all like the Jay of the dependable nightly monologue on TV.
Lorne Michaels, thirty-five years into his run of steering Saturday Night Live, had seen every kind of comedy performance. Gauging Jay from his seat in the orchestra, Michaels thought the comic was “really, really angry” about something, and was determined to satisfy whatever was expected of him—only “at double speed. Like, I want to get out of here. I know I have to do it. So I’ll give full value—the whole of the act will be in, but it will be in half the time a normal audience would be seeing it.”
Jay wasn’t displaying any overt signs of anger, but Michaels believed he was too professional to ever allow himself to let that out in public. “He can’t be an angry guy, just can’t do it. He can feel it, he can be it—he just can’t act it.” Michaels could only guess the source of Leno’s displeasure. “They made him come in, they made him do it. He had to sing for his supper, he had to audition again, and it was just all in a hostile room.”
It wasn’t as though his jokes weren’t winning laughs; it was just that the laughs seemed so perfunctory, not natural and prolonged. For many who had seen Leno kill—virtually without fail—in many previous venues, this was more than surprising. One longtime NBC executive found himself “stunned” by the performance.
“White collar crime is up—and that’s just in the church!”
It began to occur to the other comics in the lineup that Jay was having trouble finding a theme that would connect with this audience—and several concluded that the reason was obvious: The jokes had nothing to do with the event everyone was attending. Prompted in advance by Bass that this was what NBC wanted, all the other comics—other than Seinfeld, who at least connected his set about marriage to his upcoming NBC reality series, The Marriage Ref—had come prepared with material that related to NBC’s bold plan for ten p.m., or the changes in late night, or NBCʹs desperate need for hits from the latest crop of new series. Jay was relying on his standard act.
“It was a sloppy, dated set of jokes,” one of the other performers said. “As if frozen in time.” Of course no one at NBC had asked Jay what areas and topics his routine would cover. He was the biggest star on the network; he knew comedy better than any of them. They had every reason to trust his judgment on what would be funny.
Jay dredged up Idaho senator Larry Craig and his infamous bathroom escapade, which had taken place in June 2007—two years earlier.
Jay moved on to the Icelandic singer Björk and her memorable swan dress—which she had worn at the 2001 Oscars. The joke was that she had donated it to Hurricane Katrina victims. “How would you like to be the one that actually got that dress?” Jay asked. Katrina had hit New Orleans in 2005.
About fifteen minutes into Jay’s monologue, Marc Graboff, the cochairman (with Ben Silverman) of NBC Entertainment, heard his BlackBerry ping. He peeked down at it and saw a text message from his friend Lloyd Braun, the onetime top programmer at ABC, now an NBC-based