The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  Leno, still waiting backstage, had noticed the lighting situation as well but had concluded that it was because NBC was taping the event. Indeed, NBC was taping much of the show and wanted lights to capture reaction shots. Jay had expressly asked that his performance not be taped. That didn’t mean the lighting would be adjusted, however. What Jay knew from his own endless stand-up gigs was that if lights were shining on an audience, they tended to become self-conscious—and a lot less likely to laugh.

  Whatever running time had been planned, the combination of extended laughs and just general banter and interaction onstage had by now pushed the hour past ten thirty—more than half an hour into Jay time. No one had really noticed except for Leno himself, who, as was his custom, was carefully attuned to the rhythms of audience members.

  Jay was well aware that this crowd had already been to one upfront in the late afternoon. Others had come from work, having knocked off at around six to get dinner. That meant it was well past the time they usually headed for home. And they had already been sitting in this theater for over an hour and a half.

  Bass had asked Jay to do about fifteen minutes, the longest spot of the night. Jay had said he would do between ten and fifteen minutes. For Jay, doing fifteen minutes was like Bruce Springsteen dashing off a commercial jingle. He routinely dished out hours’ worth of stand-up in his appearances in Vegas. Tonight it was only a matter of which fifteen minutes he chose. For an industry audience, like the one he had performed for at the Super Bowl, he was surely going to rely heavily on his topical-humor file.

  As he waited to go on, Jay still looked a bit askew to at least one of his fellow cast members, who wondered what was up with his hair. To this observer “it looked like a Leno-fro.” Jay himself continued to believe that this was one booking that just didn’t make much sense, no matter how he broke it down. But he had a job to do, and if he believed in anything, he believed in the virtue of an honest day’s work.

  Jay was off and running from the moment Williams finished the introduction. As he crossed the stage, mic in one hand, Jay began furiously running his other hand through his impressive shock of luxuriantly thick, now mostly gray hair. Just to let the audience know he was cognizant that he was arriving onstage later than planned, he opened with a cheery notice: “We are almost a tenth through the evening!”

  Maybe the awareness that the hour was late pushed him to pick up his pace, but from the moment he started talking, Jay seemed in hyperdrive, pacing from one side of the stage to the other, fluffing his hair, spraying jokes like a water cannon firing into the crowd.

  “Well, good to see everybody. As you know, President Obama, first hundred days, pretty exciting. It’s been a fascinating year. To see a black man born to a white woman—see, that’s the decision Michael Jackson made . . .ʺ

  Boom: next one. “Of course, Hillary and Barack, now best friends. Not always that way. Remember, seven to eight months ago they met in Unity, New Hampshire. To show unity, they met in Unity, New Hampshire. Bill could not be there.” Pause. “I believe he was in Intercourse, Pennsylvania.”

  Passable laughs to kick the act off, though they didn’t last long. Jay marched on double-time to Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, targets of choice from recent monologues on The Tonight Show, followed by one about the decision to close the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay. “See, that’s when you know the economy’s in bad shape. When even the terrorists are losing their homes!” The jokes were coming so quickly that it was hard for the audience to laugh at one and catch the start of another. Jay was also moving, moving, traipsing around the stage, bending at the waist, leaning forward into the mic, which had the effect of swallowing up some of his words. In the orchestra seats a few NBC executives exchanged glances.

  Jay now moved on to airline jokes, drunk pilots. “Imagine the pilot comes on and you hear him say, ‘My name is Bob; I’m an alcoholic!’ Well, thank you, Bob!” He punched the last line, raising his voice a decibel to sell the joke harder, one of his best-honed techniques. Jay could always modulate his voice to underscore a line and almost force a laugh. He had learned the skill long ago in the clubs, and his peers considered him a master at it.

  But longtime Jay observers in the audience and among the comics backstage sensed something amiss. It was all coming too frantically; Jay seemed to be rushing, stepping on his own laughs. One top NBC official noticed with some alarm that Jay’s brow was coated with sweat, and he looked heavier than many New York-based executives remembered him. And the hand constantly thrusting through his hair . . . It all seemed slightly manic, not at all like the Jay of the dependable nightly monologue on TV.

  Lorne Michaels, thirty-five years into his run of steering Saturday Night Live, had seen every kind of comedy performance. Gauging Jay from his seat in the orchestra, Michaels thought the comic was “really, really angry” about something, and was determined to satisfy whatever was expected of him—only “at double speed. Like, I want to get out of here. I know I have to do it. So I’ll give full value—the whole of the act will be in, but it will be in half the time a normal audience would be seeing it.”

  Jay wasn’t displaying any overt signs of anger, but Michaels believed he was too professional to ever allow himself to let that out in public. “He can’t be an angry guy, just can’t do it. He can feel it, he can be it—he just can’t act it.” Michaels could only guess the source of Leno’s displeasure. “They made him come in, they made him do it. He had to sing for his supper, he had to audition again, and it was just all in a hostile room.”

  It wasn’t as though his jokes weren’t winning laughs; it was just that the laughs seemed so perfunctory, not natural and prolonged. For many who had seen Leno kill—virtually without fail—in many previous venues, this was more than surprising. One longtime NBC executive found himself “stunned” by the performance.

  “White collar crime is up—and that’s just in the church!”

  It began to occur to the other comics in the lineup that Jay was having trouble finding a theme that would connect with this audience—and several concluded that the reason was obvious: The jokes had nothing to do with the event everyone was attending. Prompted in advance by Bass that this was what NBC wanted, all the other comics—other than Seinfeld, who at least connected his set about marriage to his upcoming NBC reality series, The Marriage Ref—had come prepared with material that related to NBC’s bold plan for ten p.m., or the changes in late night, or NBCʹs desperate need for hits from the latest crop of new series. Jay was relying on his standard act.

  “It was a sloppy, dated set of jokes,” one of the other performers said. “As if frozen in time.” Of course no one at NBC had asked Jay what areas and topics his routine would cover. He was the biggest star on the network; he knew comedy better than any of them. They had every reason to trust his judgment on what would be funny.

  Jay dredged up Idaho senator Larry Craig and his infamous bathroom escapade, which had taken place in June 2007—two years earlier.

  Jay moved on to the Icelandic singer Björk and her memorable swan dress—which she had worn at the 2001 Oscars. The joke was that she had donated it to Hurricane Katrina victims. “How would you like to be the one that actually got that dress?” Jay asked. Katrina had hit New Orleans in 2005.

  About fifteen minutes into Jay’s monologue, Marc Graboff, the cochairman (with Ben Silverman) of NBC Entertainment, heard his BlackBerry ping. He peeked down at it and saw a text message from his friend Lloyd Braun, the onetime top programmer at ABC, now an NBC-based producer: “Jay not funny.”

  Many members of the audience had also attended the ABC upfront in the afternoon, when that network took a major risk and showed an entire sitcom pilot to the crowd. The show was Modern Family, and ABC’s gamble paid off, generating gales of laughs and establishing itself as a likely instant hit. Jimmy Kimmel had also almost brought down the house during the ABC event with his searingly funny monologue about the fraudulent dance that took place every year during upfront week.<
br />
  One of the comics backstage observed that not too many minutes into Jay’s performance, clusters throughout the audience “started to use their BlackBerrys. All those faces on all those ad agency people—they were bathed in the light of their BlackBerry screens.”

  For NBCʹs executives, who supported and liked Leno, this was more than unfortunate. It was borderline mean—but they considered the whole episode completely unnecessary. “It was just a misread,” one of Leno’s main NBC supporters in the audience said. “Jay didn’t read the crowd right.”

  By now even Jeff Zucker, Jay’s most prominent supporter, was squirming in his seat. The whole idea of the show had been for Jay to do a kick-ass set at the end of the evening and send everyone out into the night juiced about having comedy of that quality available five times a week at ten p.m. Yet even Zucker could not deny what he was seeing and hearing: Jay was doing terribly. He was going on too long and his material wasn’t current. In Zucker’s theater-chair psychoanalysis, Jay’s floundering that night had everything to do with two factors: New York and David Letterman. Zucker believed that Jay had long ago concluded that New York was Letterman’s city. It was, after all, where Dave did his show. Dave, who after all these years, most of them in second place, still haunted Jay in many ways. Dave, who had become something close to the voice of the city after the 9/11 attacks, when no late-night host would dare go back on the air until after Letterman had addressed the tragedy and reopened television to the possibility of being funny again.

  Jay would travel just about anywhere to perform, but he avoided booking dates in New York—not at Carnegie Hall, where he had played early in his career; not at the Garden. NBC had tried for years to convince him to come to New York for the upfronts or other events, but he had always declined.

  Though New York’s comic sensibility was widely acknowledged to be significantly different from what came out of LA—and certainly Vegas—Zucker didn’t believe Leno’s reluctance to play Manhattan had anything to do with his comic sensibility being wrong for the city. (Though he himself was from Miami, Jeff had lived and worked his entire career in New York—and he certainly appreciated Jay’s comedy style.) No, Zucker simply thought Jay hated New York, the idea of New York, Dave’s town. Somehow, psychologically, New York had become screwed up for Jay.

  But now he was in New York and still trying. Jay, widely acknowledged as the most skilled stand-up of his generation—even Letterman, in interviews early in his career and late, agreed with that assessment—sensed things weren’t going well. He dug deep, searching for a comic vein that might offer some riches, something down in the vast store of material recorded in his brain, anything that might ignite the audience, and then maybe he could find his rhythm and turn it around, as he had so many times before.

  He tried earthquakes in LA. One joke got a solid laugh for being sharp and smart: “When Bush was in the White House, all the black people were out of work. Now the black guy is in the White House . . . hmmm.” But then he tried talking about his wife’s cat—and cats in general. Jay hammered away for six minutes on cats, scoring only glancingly when he stopped to ask a woman in the audience if she had any cats. “Three,” she said. “Three cats!” Jay replied and, dropping his voice, added, “Single woman?”

  At around that time, some twenty minutes in, the squeak of chair seats lifting could be heard in isolated locations around the theater. In the aisles figures with ducked heads began darting up toward the exit. People were walking out on Jay Leno.

  If he noticed this display of rudeness—and with all the house lights on, it was hard to miss—Jay didn’t show it, nor did it slow him down in the least. Instead he tacked toward absurd side-effect warnings on drug labels, including one for restless leg syndrome and another that threatened “explosive diarrhea and possible sexual dysfunction,” which he used as the perfect setup to explore how this could affect someone’s love life. “For some reason women are not attracted to men with explosive diarrhea.”

  Another ping from Graboff’s BlackBerry. Braun again: “Make him stop!”

  At twenty-seven minutes the chair squeaks were spreading and the stream of exiting guests had grown steadily, with the evacuees looking less embarrassed as they fled. Jay turned to a tried-and-true source of laughs for him: “How fat are we getting!”

  Down in the front row, Zucker had one thought: Is this gonna end?

  Finally, thirty-two minutes into his monologue, Jay looked around and said, “Well, let’s see, what else can we talk about?” He added to this awkward transition by observing, “I guess I’ve answered all the questions about the new show!” Then, looking down at the audience again, he asked, “Does anybody have any questions?”

  A woman not far from the stage had one that no one else in the theater could hear because she wasn’t mic’d. Jay’s answer was also muffled, though it drew enough of a laugh from the spectators in the first few rows for Jay to close the proceedings. He offered a big-voiced thanks and good night to the crowd, bowing briefly to applause that sounded respectful, even warm. He had been at it for more than half an hour, working it and sweating, and he was, after all, the guy in America’s bedroom for the past seventeen years. Jay waved and exited, stage left.

  After returning briefly to thank everyone for coming, Brian Williams felt he had to say something about Leno’s performance: “Jay, Bea Arthur called; she needs her hair back.” It drew what sounded to Williams like “a relief laugh—the kind of laugh you get in church when you’re allowed to laugh at the sermon.”

  Out in the lobby, moving among the departing crowd, NBC executives exchanged looks of chagrin. No one knew what exactly had happened. Jay had always been Mr. Reliable—not only in politicking for his show with affiliate managers and admen, but also in joke delivery. This night he had swung big—and missed.

  Marc Graboff, cornered by a couple of reporters, didn’t dodge the obvious. “Jay was just off,” he said. “He didn’t read the audience and had the weakest act of the night.”

  Jay himself wasted no time in jumping into a car and heading for Teterboro, where his plane was also waiting. He was still disturbed by the house lights, how alienated the audience had seemed with the lights on them. Even though this upfront—like all others—was dominated by ad buyers, not affiliate managers, Jay was still convinced that many of the people in the audience that night were from the same crowd he had performed for at the Florida event. And the earlier acts had stretched the evening out, leaving him to appear so late that people were eager to get home on a work night. It had turned into a disaster pretty much all the way around.

  But Jay was too much a pro to make excuses for himself. He knew the night had not gone well, but he did not view it as a setback. There would be other nights—there were always other nights.

  Some of the comics stayed backstage while the crowd left, more than one of them somewhat aghast. Most would have agreed with Jay’s assessment at the mini press conference that evening that comics of his rank and experience never really bombed anymore, but what had they just witnessed happen out there? Some were flabbergasted that Jay had seemed to violate a fundamental comedy prohibition in his wrap-up by admitting that he had no more jokes and then asking the audience if they had any questions. That was the stuff of lectures, not comedy acts.

  The worst thing his struggling performance had done was to expose the most vulnerable side of Jay Leno—the alleged lack of edge and hip-ness in his comedy—to withering appraisal from his detractors. Many of those detractors happened to be denizens of that place that so unnerved him: New York. Even among some of the comedy talent at NBC, there was an undercurrent of latent disrespect toward Leno. Now it slithered to the surface.

  One showcase cast member blamed Jay for undoing what had been an entertaining and successful night. Others offered comments about how dated the material seemed to be. The most vocal Jay critic took the nastiest tack, wondering out loud if the audience had just been “served the same shit Jay feeds to the free-buffet c
rowd in Branson, Missouri.”

  Early the next morning—even cooler, with a sprinkle of rain, which was CBSʹs problem now—Jeff Zucker arrived at 30 Rock, not overly disturbed by the disappointment of Leno’s performance. On the whole the night had gone extremely well. Conan and Fallon were outstanding. The other acts scored. People got a lot of laughs from NBC’s impromptu chuckle-front. An aberrant off performance by Jay was not going to have any significant impact on either the expectations for The Jay Leno Show or the willingness of advertisers to buy time in it. It was unfortunate that Jay had misfired, but it was hardly a crisis; nothing to do about it but shrug it off.

  Still, the view from the fifty-second floor, high above Rockefeller Plaza, where NBC had its suite of senior executive offices, was almost always awe-inspiring. Way up there, literally among the clouds on that overcast morning, it may not have been easy to hear what another NBC staff member who had seen the show called “the cautiously hushed buzz” about Jay. That buzz was “decidedly caustic toward Leno,” the staff member said.

  As various employees discussed the evening, they realized they were for the first time expressing real fears about what might happen in the ten p.m. hour in the fall. The network had so much invested in this guy, five hours of prime time a week, which meant that he had arguably more riding on his shoulders than any individual had in the history of television. It seemed, to some at least, that Jay Leno had come to New York for an event of clear, vital importance, in a theater packed with buyers, the very people who would decide the financial future of this show, and the entire network, and, in essence, he had “phoned it in.”