The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [11]
Many members of the audience had also attended the ABC upfront in the afternoon, when that network took a major risk and showed an entire sitcom pilot to the crowd. The show was Modern Family, and ABC’s gamble paid off, generating gales of laughs and establishing itself as a likely instant hit. Jimmy Kimmel had also almost brought down the house during the ABC event with his searingly funny monologue about the fraudulent dance that took place every year during upfront week.
One of the comics backstage observed that not too many minutes into Jay’s performance, clusters throughout the audience “started to use their BlackBerrys. All those faces on all those ad agency people—they were bathed in the light of their BlackBerry screens.”
For NBCʹs executives, who supported and liked Leno, this was more than unfortunate. It was borderline mean—but they considered the whole episode completely unnecessary. “It was just a misread,” one of Leno’s main NBC supporters in the audience said. “Jay didn’t read the crowd right.”
By now even Jeff Zucker, Jay’s most prominent supporter, was squirming in his seat. The whole idea of the show had been for Jay to do a kick-ass set at the end of the evening and send everyone out into the night juiced about having comedy of that quality available five times a week at ten p.m. Yet even Zucker could not deny what he was seeing and hearing: Jay was doing terribly. He was going on too long and his material wasn’t current. In Zucker’s theater-chair psychoanalysis, Jay’s floundering that night had everything to do with two factors: New York and David Letterman. Zucker believed that Jay had long ago concluded that New York was Letterman’s city. It was, after all, where Dave did his show. Dave, who after all these years, most of them in second place, still haunted Jay in many ways. Dave, who had become something close to the voice of the city after the 9/11 attacks, when no late-night host would dare go back on the air until after Letterman had addressed the tragedy and reopened television to the possibility of being funny again.
Jay would travel just about anywhere to perform, but he avoided booking dates in New York—not at Carnegie Hall, where he had played early in his career; not at the Garden. NBC had tried for years to convince him to come to New York for the upfronts or other events, but he had always declined.
Though New York’s comic sensibility was widely acknowledged to be significantly different from what came out of LA—and certainly Vegas—Zucker didn’t believe Leno’s reluctance to play Manhattan had anything to do with his comic sensibility being wrong for the city. (Though he himself was from Miami, Jeff had lived and worked his entire career in New York—and he certainly appreciated Jay’s comedy style.) No, Zucker simply thought Jay hated New York, the idea of New York, Dave’s town. Somehow, psychologically, New York had become screwed up for Jay.
But now he was in New York and still trying. Jay, widely acknowledged as the most skilled stand-up of his generation—even Letterman, in interviews early in his career and late, agreed with that assessment—sensed things weren’t going well. He dug deep, searching for a comic vein that might offer some riches, something down in the vast store of material recorded in his brain, anything that might ignite the audience, and then maybe he could find his rhythm and turn it around, as he had so many times before.
He tried earthquakes in LA. One joke got a solid laugh for being sharp and smart: “When Bush was in the White House, all the black people were out of work. Now the black guy is in the White House . . . hmmm.” But then he tried talking about his wife’s cat—and cats in general. Jay hammered away for six minutes on cats, scoring only glancingly when he stopped to ask a woman in the audience if she had any cats. “Three,” she said. “Three cats!” Jay replied and, dropping his voice, added, “Single woman?”
At around that time, some twenty minutes in, the squeak of chair seats lifting could be heard in isolated locations around