Jay Leno is too polite to state the obvious: Late-night network shows under their current stewardship are no longer funny. If anything, they’re offensively predictable.
In an interview Tuesday on NBC’s “Today,” Leno, who hosted the network’s “Tonight Show” when it was ratings king, bemoaned the explicit political messaging that now substitutes for what were previously known as “comedic monologues.”
“Everyone has to know your politics,” he said. “Plus, you know, I did it when, you know, Clinton was horny and Bush was dumb and it was just a little easier. You know, now it’s all very serious.”
Leno said that when he was host of “Tonight Show,” the goal was to “make fun of the news” but that “now people just want to be on the news all the time,” and he said that makes it “tough” for today’s hosts, Stephen Colbert (CBS), Jimmy Fallon (NBC), and Jimmy Kimmel (ABC).
Leno is almost 70, so he could be forgiven for a desperately wrong reading of the late-night landscape, though I suspect he simply didn’t want to state the blindingly obvious.
Colbert, Fallon, and Kimmel are almost never funny in their opening monologues. CNN each morning runs a montage of the knee-slappers from the night before and I imagine the producer tasked with that project falls into a deep depression as he combs through what each host said, trying to sort out what are presumably jokes from what are otherwise slogans for the #Resistance. ‘Kimmel called Trump a conman, Colbert said Trump had sex with a dictator and Fallon did another Trump impersonation… decisions, decisions.’
The website Mediaite catalogs many of the political jokes from late-night, and here’s a sample of the headlines just from Colbert: “Colbert Mocks Voters for Sticking With Trump: ‘He Stole My Wallet … I Want to Vote for Him!’”; “Stephen Colbert Mocks Trump’s ‘Tim Apple’ Excuse: ‘Words Don’t Just Disappear’”; and “Colbert Tears Into Tucker Carlson: ‘Let’s Be Honest. You’re Awful on So Many Levels.’”
This isn’t joke writing. It’s not writing at all. It’s copying text straight from news reports and assuming the audience will applaud when the host reads it off the teleprompter.
Mediaite noted on Tuesday that Colbert and Kimmel did the exact same joke about a video clip of Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, blowing out the candles on his birthday cake.
This isn’t some new world with an audience that Leno and other real comedians don’t understand. It’s a business decision by network TV executives who, for one reason or another, think merely blurting out the word “Trump” is an adequate substitute for comedy.
Kimmel, Colbert, and Fallon each get between 2 and 4 million viewers each night, with Colbert getting the most of all three. It’s a sizable audience, but their shows are free to the public. Kimmel is getting the smallest share of that audience, and don’t tell me it’s not because he used his platform to cry about healthcare. Fallon is a distant second to Colbert, I suspect because he can’t do humor if it’s not written as a musical skit.
By contrast, HBO’s weekly “Real Time with Bill Maher,” which you can only get by paying a subscription, consistently garners about 1.5 million viewers. Why is Maher getting so many viewers despite charging them money? It’s because even though his show is political and he hates Trump, he’s at least not entirely predictable — and he’s even funny.
How do you make the Trump-collusion story funny? This is how, from one of Maher’s monologues in January: “He met Putin five times. That’s a lot of times in just a couple of years, always with nobody around. Nobody can ever know what they’re doing. Forget collusion, I wanna know if there’s penetration.”
It’s crude and maybe not your brand of humor, but at least there’s a surprise at the end rather than what the network hosts do, which is wink while saying to the camera, “Trump is orange and he likes porn!”
Yes, comedy is “tough,” otherwise we’d all be funny. But that’s not why late-night is so awful today. It’s because the hosts have no imagination, the writers are lazy, and that’s the way their bosses like it.
