That’s why, apparently, the White House Correspondents Dinner will feature Jay Leno, giving the nation’s standups yet another opportunity to unload on the (sort of) hapless Jay. I was going to let this whole late night imbroglio pass me by, but this latest Leno pile-on has been too much for me to bear.
Other comics hate Jay first because he makes about a thousand times much money as they do and second because he’s happy. Unlike other comics, Jay has a life—a strange life, to be sure—a near unbelievable obsession with the internal combustion engine, amply on display at his entertaining blog Jay Leno’s Garage.1 What with his five-night a week gig with NBC, his constant live gigs on the weekends, the endless hours spent polishing the chrome, and changing the oil, on his Duesenbergs, Bugattis, and Harleys, Jay must get four hours of sleep a night, tops. He’s too exhausted to know that he should be wallowing in self-pity and self-loathing like David Letterman.
As for Conan O’Brien, who strikes me as a Harvard hustler possessing the wit of Marty Allen,2 he started the whole damn thing five years ago, threatening to leave NBC if they didn’t give him the Tonight Show for his very own. NBC caved, which surely did not please Jay very much, since he was beating the pants off of David Letterman, who had left NBC in a snit a few years earlier, to compete against Jay at CBS.
Shortly thereafter, Dave, or his “people,” started threatening CBS by flirting with a move to ABC, where the highly respected if slightly fatuous Ted Koppel was starting to slow down. When the news that ABC was thinking of replacing Ted became public, Dave generously assured Ted on the air that he could have his Nightline job “as long as he likes” (as long as ABC liked, really, but we all know what Dave meant), a gesture made easier by the fact that CBS had come across with the big fat pay package that Dave always wanted in the first place.
Now Conan is bravely quitting NBC, for $30 plus million, and bravely wrecking the careers of the 150-odd people who work for him, though many—though not all—will probably get jobs with him when he goes to work for ABC in a year or two, where, surely, he will run a distant third to codger Jay and codger Dave.
Afterwords
Back in 2006, comic Stephen Colbert provoked outrage at the WHCD by making fun of the President and, worse, making fun of the WHC themselves! Ludicrously, they replaced him with a sixties antique, Rich Little, whose impressions of Howard Cosell and Georgie Jessel fell strangely flat. After that humiliation, the WHC went for first Craig Ferguson (yeah, that Craig Ferguson) in 2008 and then (think black!) Wanda Sykes in 2009. Strangely, it was Lyndon Johnson who had the last word on the WHCD, a long time ago: “It’s like throwing cow chips at the village idiot for four hours.”
1. Skip all the filler that Jay’s been putting up over the past seven months while he’s been on at 10.
2. Yeah, yeah. You have to be a hundred years old to get this joke, but I’m too damn mad to care.
