Late-night comedy: Conan’s and Jay’s last stand

“Finally, something from NBC people want to watch,” said Robert Bianco in USA Today. When it announced last week it was yanking Jay Leno’s variety show from prime time after just four months of bad ratings, the hapless network set in motion a slow-motion, fully televised corporate debacle. In a boneheaded flip-flop, NBC said it would return Leno to his old, 11:35 p.m. slot and shove The Tonight Show—also sagging in the ratings—to the witching hour of 12:05 a.m. An infuriated Conan O’Brien, who had taken over Tonight from Leno in June, successfully demanded to be let out of his contract (he walked away with $40 million), while spending two weeks using his dying show to get even with his bosses. “NBC has been calling me every name in the book,” Conan said, in one typical broadside. “In fact, they think I’m such an idiot they now want me to run the network.” An equally acerbic Leno cracked that NBC stands for “Never Believe Your Contract” and announced, “I take pride in one thing. I leave NBC prime time the same way I found it—a complete disaster.”

It was the funniest both Leno and O’Brien have been in months, said Matthew Gilbert in The Boston Globe. When Johnny Carson was the king of late-night comedy back in the 1960s and ’70s, The Tonight Show was edgy, unpredictable, and sometimes even glamorous. But today the best political humor is being produced by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert over at Comedy Central, while networks like E! better satisfy the hunger for celebrities. The networks’ late-night shows feel dated and threadbare, consisting mostly of “a few one-liners, a series of kiss-kiss interviews, a wooden desk, and a coffee mug.”

But ratings for both O’Brien and Leno were way up this past week, said Lee Siegel in TheDailyBeast.com, and for a very good reason. They were publicly saying “what every one of us has wanted to say to those butt-kissing mediocrities who we have to answer to at work’’: You’re a jerk! Mocking your employer is a deeply satisfying form of humor in these scary economic times, when we’ve all paid the price for the ineptitude of the geniuses at the top. For two brief weeks, even as his show flamed out, O’Brien finally passed the water-cooler test in offices across America: Did you hear what Conan said about the guys who run NBC last night?

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