Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield is a gem. Here's his take on a recent pop scuffle:
Jay Leno — he played this one beautifully. Five years ago, when NBC turned Leno into a time bomb by promising his job to Conan O'Brien, he ticked quietly, keeping his rage to himself — but, oh, how it must have burned. Now he gets to taste the sweet nectar of vengeance. By sucking so bad that NBC could no longer tolerate him in prime time, he sucked his way right back into his old job. The tragedy of all this is that NBC has somehow turned two winning hands into a lose-the-farm fold.
We've never seen Conan pissed off before, and it suits him. Now that he's showing his claws, he's finally proving himself fit for the job just as he walks away from it. His charm has always been his refusal to act like we owe him anything; he doesn't have the angst or neurosis that drives Jay and Dave. If he did, he'd be unbearable. (Actually, he'd be Norm MacDonald — same thing.) Early in his career, he got lucky breaks because people liked him. Nobody wants to see a lucky guy get mad — it's bad manners, and for Conan, bad manners is bad comedy. (Cont'd in comments.)
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In rage mode, Conan is funnier than he's been since moving to 11:35. But it's strange to see him tangle with Jay. We're used to seeing Letterman rage at NBC, CBS and Sarah Palin. Dave thrives on conflict — as he joked, he's the product of "Lutheran Midwestern guilt." Leno and O'Brien seem like nice Catholic boys, most comfortable when everyone's getting along. Yet behind Leno's Guy Smiley-Muppet mask, he's a killing machine — the Terminator of late-night comedians.
Conan's a writer and Jay's a performer, and you can't overstate how different those mentalities are. Jay got The Tonight Show after getting up in front of hostile drunks in countless shitty late-night dives around the country, year in and year out, and making those assholes laugh. Conan got the job by being funny in a room full of other writers. This isn't to slight either of them — but Jay has always been tougher and darker than people realize.
Leno doesn't need TV. He could just go to Vegas and make more money doing what he loves best, which is stand-up. Last year he told Rolling Stone he banked his Tonight Show money and lived on his stand-up earnings.
So why did he hang around NBC long enough to bring the whole network down in flames? Maybe he just felt pushed around. Leno's got the stomach for fights. Like Paul McCartney, another nice guy wrongly dismissed as a cream puff, Jay made his bones in the sleaziest, nastiest showbiz shark pools on earth. He plays nice for the old ladies, but his street-fighting instincts are off the charts. He's left plenty of carrion on the late-night highway. Arsenio Hall, Chevy Chase, Magic Johnson — Jay knocked them all off the air, and you can bet he still savors the memory of their death cries.
But it's tempting for any late-night host to believe he's the star, rather than the show: Medically, this is known as Arsenio Syndrome. But people watch The Tonight Show because it's on, not because they like it. Conan and Jay respect this — they knew that once they're off the air, people might miss them for a few nights, but then they'll watch whoever the next guy is. (Who weeps for Craig Kilborn now?) Conan has shown he's shrewd and confident enough to move on, and wherever he goes, he'll be funnier than he was on NBC. Jay could have walked away from the whole brawl before it began — but then, he's in it for the fight, not the funny.
One of the reasons late-night shows go so horribly wrong so often is that the physical toll of the job is different from other gigs. It requires stamina, psychic isolation and an inability to get bored. As late-night failure Dennis Miller said years ago to the ultimate late-night ironman, Tom Snyder, "You guys are resilient. You come out here every night, you look interested. Me, by Wednesday, I'd be so disinterested, I'd look like I'd been shot with Thorazine." (If you ever watched Miller's show, you probably felt like you'd been shot with Thorazine yourself.)
Jay and Conan both have this stamina, and it's extraordinarily rare. There are only a few guys alive who have the freakazoid DNA to do the job. Yet NBC has lost Conan with nothing to show for it except for more Jay, whose prime-time flameout leaves him smelling like a week-old Happy Meal. It's one of the most horrific network fuckups in history, and at this point, nobody knows how gory the endgame will look. But one thing is for sure: We'll never have to see Jay Leno at 10:00 again. Hey, anybody know if Arsenio is busy?
[From Issue 1097 — February 4, 2010]
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