The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [114]
So Conan figured that with his younger-skewing style it was always going to be hard to recruit the Dave fans and the Jay fans—especially the latter. They had enjoyed years of a different sort of Tonight Show than the one Conan was going to offer, and besides, now they could wait the summer out and get back to their chosen comic in September.
As satisfied as Conan was with so much of the Tonight Show experience, something about the decision to keep Jay continued to distress him. Jay didn’t really feel gone, thanks to NBCʹs decision to give him ten p.m., and his presence lingered—like the long-graduated college alum who still wanted to hang around the dorm and party.
Conan knew his late-night history. Every other Tonight host had enjoyed the unconditional support of the brass in New York and LA: The network lined their big clanking machine behind their choice and went full bore on his behalf. In his case it felt as if they were somehow hedging their bet. But Conan believed that tentativeness had to change; they couldn’t half give anybody The Tonight Show. Nobody half married somebody. You’re in or you’re not, right? All he could do for now was accept NBC’s protestations of good faith and hope Jay and ten would work out. He had to root for Jay.
Meanwhile, stick to the knitting. For Conan, that meant hitting the notes he knew best how to sing. Yes, he wanted to build a mass audience following, but at what risk? He found himself confronting a fundamental question: Did they really expect him to grab a broad-based viewership immediately without alienating his core fans? To him it made no sense to send a signal to all those college kids and seventeen-year-olds secretly staying up late to watch him in their bedrooms, or following his bits online, that he wasn’t their guy anymore.
The problem was this: By the time Conan loped out onstage every night at 11:35 p.m., another late-night host, with increasingly potent appeal to those same college kids and teens in front of their video and computer screens, was already five minutes into his act, one that was being widely admired for both its comedy and its “truthiness.”
Stephen Colbert had so quickly thrust his comic character and his blowhard vocabulary into the national consciousness that the Merriam-Webster dictionary editors had selected “truthiness”—according to Colbert, “what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are”—as its Word of the Year in 2006. A year earlier, after Colbert had been on the air only a few months, another group, the American Dialect Society, had awarded it the same honor, while clarifying truthiness as a “stunt word.”
In a way, the whole Colbert Report on the Comedy Central cable channel was a stunt, the first late-night entry to flout the premise that nightly talk-show exposure inevitably reveals the real personality of the host. Stephen Colbert wasn’t doing faux news like his pal Jon Stewart; he was doing faux personality. His on-air character started out as a full-blown satirical take on Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, only bigger and more bloviating. The show’s conceit had distinct advantages. Colbert could mock the excesses and bizarre stances taken by right-wing talk-show hosts by celebrating them instead of denigrating them. (And indeed some conservatives—like the former House majority leader Tom DeLay—didnʹt quite get the joke for a time, thinking maybe they finally had a really funny guy on their side.)
It was a filament-fine line, but Colbert danced agilely on it most nights thanks to laser-sharp writing and his own consummate improv skills. That was never more apparent than during his transformative performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner. Booked, as comics had always been, to provide a little humor—and maybe a dig or two at the current chief executive—Colbert brought out the biggest sword he could find and laid waste. Capturing much of the prevailing national take on the Bush administration, Colbert took his pretend admiration to the heights of absurdity that national opinion demanded.
In one of his most quoted