Jihadist calls for Letterman’s tongue

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 11:33 AM - 0 Comments

A frequent poster on an online jihadist forum has called on American Muslims to cut off David Letterman’s tongue. The late night television host earned the extremists’ ire by telling jokes about Osama bin Laden’s replacement during his monologue on June 8. “To the righteous Muslims in America: Isn’t there a man among you … who can cut off the tongue of this lousy Jew and silence him forever?” wrote the poster, identified as Umar al Basrawi in an article by the New York Post. Letterman is not Jewish. The threat was first identified by the Middle East Media Research Institute, an organization that monitors jihadis online.

New York Post

Late-night is for frat boys only

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 1:00 AM - 11 Comments

Jay Leno is back on The Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien is gone, and fans are arguing over which version of the show is better. But no matter how often the host changes, one thing never seems to change: Leno currently has no women on his writing staff—when Sarah Palin performed a stand-up routine for him, her jokes were written by men—and neither did O’Brien during his Tonight Show tenure. In late-night comedy, shows can go years without a woman in the writers’ room, and things have gotten worse in recent years: David Letterman’s first head writer was a woman (Merrill Markoe), but he didn’t have any female writers last year. Markoe told Maclean’s that when she started in the business, “everyone made fun of ‘tokenism.’ Every show had its token one to two women.” In today’s late-night world, she’s starting to “look back at tokenism fondly as a time of enlightenment.”

Why don’t late-night shows hire women to write for them? The simplest reason is that most of the writers who apply for the job are men: “When I started the show with Dave in the early ’80s, very few women submitted work,” Markoe says. But even today, when there are more female stand-up comics and other women who Markoe describes as “very familiar with the general sensibility” of late-night comedy, things haven’t been any better. “Women are equal watchers of those shows,” fumes Melissa Silverstein, blogger and founder of womenandhollywood.com, “yet are somehow not thought of as capable of contributing behind the scenes.”

If hosts do hire a woman, it’s often because they knew her already. Craig Ferguson, who hosts The Late Late Show, has one female staff writer: his sister Lynn, a respected comedian in her own right. Markoe was romantically involved with Letterman at one point, and when Jimmy Kimmel broke up with Sarah Silverman, tabloids reported that he was dating his writer Molly McNearney. Without a prior relationship, it can take a long time for a woman to win the trust of the people who do the hiring; Jill Goodwin, who got a job last month as Letterman’s first female writer in years, was an assistant on the show for almost a decade. “People hire people they’re comfortable with,” says Silverstein, and in practice, it seems like hosts aren’t comfortable with women they haven’t met repeatedly.

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Late night civil war

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 8 Comments

When Conan O’Brien hosted his final episode of The Tonight Show last Friday—“we have exactly one hour to steal every item in this studio,” he announced—it somehow seemed appropriate that he was losing the show to Jay Leno the same week the Democrats lost Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown: this latest late-night shakeup has inspired the kind of passion usually reserved for political movements. When NBC announced that it was giving the 11:35 p.m. time slot back to Leno (after angry affiliates forced the network to cancel his low-rated prime-time show), there was what veteran TV critic Diane Werts described to Maclean’s as “a frenzy.” NBC executive Jeff Zucker, who is often blamed for the decline of the network, told Charlie Rose that he received death threats over the move. Demonstrations were held across America to protest the reinstatement of Leno, including a rain-soaked rally outside the Tonight Show studio, where O’Brien and sidekick Andy Richter waved to the crowd like politicians departing office. When Leno got The Tonight Show in 1992 instead of David Letterman, it was just an entertaining showbiz story, but Leno and O’Brien have come to represent more than who gets to interview Tom Hanks. They may be a proxy for two different viewpoints in a divided country.

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LCK on Coco: "His dreams are misguided"

By Colby Cosh - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 7:03 AM - 9 Comments

Louis C.K., who may be the dean of American standup comedy (or perhaps a regent serving during the Madness of King Chappelle), offers a sage commentary on the Late Night Wars. His insight is unique and valuable because 1) it’s Louis C.K., for God’s sake; 2) it’s saturated with sincere respect for everybody involved; 3) he’s written for and with pretty much everybody, including Conan O’Brien and David Letterman; 4) it’s easy to forget because he’s bald and pudgy, but he’s got a generational perspective quite distinct, in important ways, from that of the principals. LCK is four years younger than the boyish Conan, and easily young enough to be Jay Leno’s kid. In some respects he is obviously speaking for all the major comic talents out there who haven’t yet had their own successful series.

Jay Leno: Anti-Conan Insurance

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 12:40 PM - 36 Comments

As Conan O’Brien signs his severance pact with NBC and prepares to leave — see Maureen Ryan for the latest good LenCon analysis — the Hollywood Reporter points us to this 2008 article where an “inside source” sort of predicted the whole thing (I’ve added line breaks for greater ease of reading):

NBC has committed to Conan for ‘The Tonight Show’ and will go through with it. It’s less of a financial decision, because the $40-45 million penalty payment is not super relevant. If they went to Jay and said, ‘we need you to split the payment,’ he’d do it. They’ve made a public commitment to Conan and don’t want to get beaten up over it.

NBC will do everything to try to keep Jay. Morning shows, afternoon shows, daytime shows – he won’t take any of those. They will try to keep Jay in the fold so if Conan fails on ‘The Tonight Show’ they will put Jay right back in there. Jeff Zucker will call Jay into his office with big wink and say, ‘if you say it publicly I’ll deny it, but if Conan fails, I want you back.’ That’s just the way NBC works. Back when Dave and Jay were fighting over ‘The Tonight Show,’ they tried to see if they could do the same thing. That’s what they’re going to try and do here with Jay and Conan, only they are more likely to pull it off this time.

So much for the “not getting beaten up” part, of course.

In my opinion, David Letterman has been the most entertaining person in this whole thing. His response to Leno’s “don’t blame Conan” comments, two nights ago, was particularly good. Letterman is bitter and cranky and his affable manner (intentionally) does not conceal his seething rage. All this can be a handicap when he’s trying to be lighthearted and funny, but it is perfectly suited for the current situation, in addition to the fact that he isn’t directly involved in this and can therefore say whatever he wants (unlike Conan). Letterman was the guy who really perfected the idea that a talk-show host could be a character on his own show, someone whose reactions, feelings and petty jealousies could be a part of each night’s storyline. Other people had done it, of course, but his shows are really not so much talk shows as the story of a guy hosting a talk show. And the reactions of the Letterman character, with his anger, his personal baggage, his passive-aggressive loathing of Leno, and his taunting response to Leno’s cheap shots (Leno can’t really think of anything to say about Letterman except to refer to the blackmail scandal over and over) has created some of his best character-comedy moments.

I think my favourite part of this speech is “Lonnie Donegan.”

[vodpod id=Video.2905453&w=560&h=340&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

And just for the hell of it, and to explain the obscure reference, here’s the actual Lonnie Donegan with one of his biggest hit recordings:

Comedy fans may remember Stan Freberg’s hilarious parody of Donegan’s endless pre-song narration.

Scenes from a television war

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 11:05 AM - 71 Comments

The Conan-Leno fight is clearly a generational one. I have yet to hear anyone in my online social network declare for “Team Leno”; I’m not sure that there is any such thing, or who would be part of it if there were. Consider this: Jay Leno was at one time one of the most respected standup comedians on Earth, and continues to perform live all over the continent and refine his live act. Conan O’Brien, a Harvard man who spent no more than ten seconds paying comic dues of any kind, has no traceable experience of standup. And yet every single standup comic I’ve heard or seen weigh in on the feud has backed Conan—even though he appears to be walking away from the Tonight Show, which has been the dominant economic force in their industry for more than 50 years. There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.

At first I was tempted to wonder if blowback from the 2007-08 Writer’s Guild strike was playing a role here. Some comics were uncomfortable with Leno making a side deal to do struck work by writing his own monologues for the Tonight Show. But Leno was exonerated in WGA hearings, and besides, union hatred of blacklegs can’t account for the mass popular agitation against Leno. Moreover, from a strictly business standpoint, Conan started this whole fracas during his 2004 negotiations with NBC when he demanded that the countdown be started on Leno’s Tonight Show tenure. This game of musical chairs, with Conan, Leno, and Jimmy Fallon trying to squeeze together onto two bus seats, would never have existed if not for that maneouvre. Any such move against Johnny Carson would have been regarded as an appalling act of showbiz regicide.

In part, surely, this affray is being perceived as a replay of the Leno-Letterman war. (Wars, one notices, often come in pairs.) Back then, Leno’s cartoonish scheming coupled with his interruption of what was perceived as a natural monarchical succession, with Letterman as the rightful heir, to turn industry and popular sentiment against him. Over time, Leno proved that NBC had made the correct business decision. But like King John he couldn’t shake the bad reputation he had earned by stepping out of line. He made matters worse by giving the world a safe, sterile Tonight Show, without the slyness or the dimly anarchic aura of Carson’s version. Though, again, it must be to somebody’s taste. Leno seems a lot like Margaret Thatcher—you never heard any performer or intellectual in England say they didn’t loathe her with every cell of their body, and yet she kept on winning elections.

Letterman himself has seen a lot of his edge dulled in the meantime; I can’t be alone in having found his Late Night work seminal, but finding myself unable to watch him fawn over celebrities and extract cheap laughs from audiences now. Owing to events, however—9/11, the heart bypass, marriage, progeny, and even his philandering—he has somehow grown in American affections. Conan, who already loomed larger than Leno in the annals of American comedy before anybody thought of giving him a talk show, is certainly serving as a proxy or champion for Letterman in people’s imaginations. If the spirit of the revolt against Leno could be summed up in a single phrase, it might be “Not again!”

Guy Laliberté's space concert, Sarah Palin's revenge, and a tribute for the Man in Black

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, October 9, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Just add water
His Cirque du Soleil shows are a staple in Las Vegas, one of the planet’s most profligate users of water, but space tourist and Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberté is on a self-described “poetic social mission” to raise awareness of the need for access to clean drinking water. The Montreal-based Laliberté, who spent more than US$35 million for a 12-day visit to the International Space Station, donned a red foam clown’s nose as he arrived at the station last Friday, but his trip isn’t all fun and games. On Oct. 9, the Cirque founder hosts an all-star webcast at onedrop.org as the station orbits the planet. The two-hour “poetic tale,” written by novelist Yann Martel, brings together personalities from 14 world cities. Among them: former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, U2, Peter Gabriel, Shakira, Canadian astronaut Julie Payette, environmentalist David Suzuki and Slumdog Millionaire composer A.R. Rahman. Laliberté says he hopes the event will raise awareness for One Drop’s aim of “water for all, all for water.”

Paradise doesn’t come easy
Kurtis Coombs, a 19-year-old political science major at Memorial University, had a first-hand lesson last week in the dark art of politics. For almost two days, he was the elected mayor of Paradise, Nfld., where he lives with his parents while commuting to school in St. John’s. But Canada’s youngest mayor found his victory short-lived. A recount shaved his razor-thin three-vote victory into a tie with incumbent Ralph Wiseman. The draw was settled by putting both names in a recycling bin and picking the winner. With that, Wiseman returned to office and Coombs is back in class. A Facebook page has been set up to assist Coombs “in keeping the job that was stolen from him.” On Tuesday, a judge ordered a second recount. Continue…

An Upcoming Letterman Spin-off

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 2, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 5 Comments

Call this a “desperation clip,” a clip inserted because I don’t know what else to say about this. (As more details come out, we’ll know more about just how creepy Letterman’s behaviour was — as he himself admits, sleeping with your employees isn’t exactly something to talk about with pride — and just how crooked and sneaky you have to be to become a CBS producer.) While he probably did the right thing by coming clean about what he did, there’s something a little off-putting about his decision to make it part of his show. Due to his rhythmic, comedic way of telling a story and the obvious fact that the audience wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, it became almost a comedy set-piece, not to mention something that could help him against Conan. Even if he did the right thing, the way he did it certainly made it seem like he was turning his actions, with the possible abuse-of-power issues they raise, into a ratings stunt.

But due to the positive reaction to this moment, I think the time is ripe for Worldwide Pants — a production-company name that Letterman should probably consider changing at this point, due to the implications — to produce a show based partly on Letterman’s experiences, and partly on this:

Did he make Letterman less edgy?

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 2, 2009 at 11:25 AM - 4 Comments

David Letterman is starting to get relevant again, even if it’s sometimes a creepy sort of relevance; last night he devoted a large portion of his show to a serious confession of his affairs with staff members, and the blackmail threat he received over those affairs. Even before he baffled his audience with his mostly non-comic confession of misbehaviour, he was impressing that same audience with his ability to handle serious issues: his show with President Barack Obama not only beat Conan O’Brien, but got more viewers late at night than Jay Leno did in prime time. So this is a perfect time for Paul Shaffer, Letterman’s bandleader, to be publishing a book. Shaffer didn’t intend his memoir, We’ll Be Here For the Rest Of Our Lives (co-written with David Ritz), to be another volley in the late night wars: he told Maclean’s that he simply decided he’d better do a book “while I had a few brain cells left to remember.” And while he spends some time talking about Letterman, who has employed him since 1982, much of the book is devoted to anecdotes about Shaffer’s early life in Thunder Bay, his work as an original band member on Saturday Night Live, or near-misses like turning down the role of George on Seinfeld (“Jerry’s great,” he recalls thinking, “but what kind of show could he possibly have?”). But he’ll always be known to most of us as Letterman’s bantering partner. And to understand how Letterman’s show has developed, we may need to understand the career of his bald, diminutive Canadian sidekick.

Shaffer explains in the book that almost as soon as he started working for Letterman, he came up with a persona that was a parody of the effusively smarmy showbiz legends he had seen on other talk shows, particularly Sammy Davis Jr. and Jerry Lewis. He told Maclean’s that when he began developing his act on Letterman, “I was simply spouting back a lot of the show business sayings I’d heard from my favourites like Sammy, Jerry, Uncle Miltie.” Add in his bizarre taste in clothes and his tendency to wear strange glasses (something he’d already done on Saturday Night Live), and he looks like a refugee from Las Vegas in the ’60s. Continue…

Top 10 list from the home office in David Letterman’s pants…

By Scott Feschuk - Friday, October 2, 2009 at 6:32 AM - 16 Comments

Top Ten Little-Known Facts About Letterman’s Affairs:

10. Needed drumroll to finish.

9. Craig Ferguson contractually obligated to go next.

8. Encounters only happened after shows on which Richard Simmons guested.

7. Afterward, bedroom littered with cue cards reading, “Oooooooo. Yes. YES!!”

6. Brought Biff Henderson along Continue…

Margaret Atwood goes on tour, Anna Wintour thaws, and the director of fun

By Lianne George - Friday, August 28, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Atwood nuts, rejoice
Canadian novelist and soothsayer Margaret Atwood has embarked on an international tour to promote her latest book, The Year of the Flood. As part of her campaign, she will be writing a blog to keep fans up to date on her toing and froing. In her inaugural posting, she welcomes her visitors with a photo: “Here is a picture of me in the garden with giant phlox, before starting out. Will I shrink during the tour? Will I survive it?” She also lays out some ground rules for making her tour as green as possible—for instance, placing special emphasis on train travel, local foods and organic, fair-trade coffees. She plans to pack light: “think pink, pack black. It dirts less.” Finally, she says she will take “the VegiVows” for the duration of her tour, “with the exception of non-avian and non-mammalian bioforms once a week.” She will, however, permit eggs, “viewed as a sort of nut.”

Swedish for retaliation
When the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet ran an article accusing Israeli troops of killing Palestinian youths to harvest and sell their organs, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu compared the allegations to medieval “blood libels,” which claimed that Jews used the blood of Christian babies in holy rituals. “Statements in the Swedish press were outrageous,” an official quoted Netanyahu as saying. “We are not expecting an apology—we are expecting a condemnation.” Swedish officials have so far refused to condemn the article. Until they do, Israel is prohibiting any new Swedish journalists from entering the country, which is small comfort to many angry Israelis. Concerned citizens have launched an online petition to go after the Swedes where it hurts—a nationwide boycott of Ikea. Continue…

Did you hear the one about Obama?

By John Intini - Monday, June 22, 2009 at 4:10 PM - 96 Comments

Soon after Barack Obama’s victory last November, late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel stopped by Legends, a barbershop in L.A. He was there for a trim but also to test out, “on behalf of the comedy community,” what type of jokes about the new President the almost all-black staff and clientele considered offensive. Cracks about Obama being a bad dancer are fine, they said. So are jabs at his big ears. But, Kimmel was told, Mrs. O’s “butt” is off-limits.

The skit was a joke (a pretty good one, actually), but it illustrated a real concern among some comedians and late-night scribes heading into the Obama era. Sure, comics would be able to count on Vice-President Joe Biden to regularly stuff his foot in his mouth, but Obama, unlike most of the commanders-in-chief who preceded him, wasn’t a walking punchline. Most of the late-night hosts have publicly complained about how little the President gives them to work with. Comedian Chris Rock compared Obama to the untouchable Brad Pitt. “Ooh, you’re young and virile and you’ve got a beautiful wife and kids,” Rock told CNN. “You know, what do you say?”

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Sarah Palin is no Hillary

By John Parisella - Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 5:50 PM - 29 Comments

When Hillary Clinton conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama last June, she said her campaign was responsible for 18 million cracks in the ceiling—one for every vote she obtained in the primaries. Sarah Palin would later make reference to Clinton’s concession speech when she was selected by John McCain to be his nominee, seemingly viewing herself as Clinton’s successor. Since the November election, Governor Palin has often been mentioned as a contender for the GOP nomination in 2012 and her constant presence in the media has only served to fuel that speculation.

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Phoenix and Letterman in cahoots?

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Is it a hoax, or has Joaquin Phoenix truly lost his mind? That question has been ricocheting around the blogosphere ever since a spaced-out Phoenix appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman last week, masked by dark glasses and a bushy beard, and acting virtually catatonic. While Letterman tried to pry conversation out of him, Phoenix sat stone-faced or mumbled. He forgot the name of Gwyneth Paltrow, his co-star in the movie he was ostensibly promoting—Two Lovers, a small romance with no Canadian release. And he swore at bandleader Paul Shaffer for guffawing at the notion of him introducing a clip. Meanwhile, Phoenix stuck to his story that he’s quit acting to be a rap singer, and said he hoped to perform on the show. “That seems unlikely,” said Letterman. “We’ll keep you in our Rolodex.”

The 34-year-old actor—a two-time Oscar nominee for Gladiator and Walk the Line—first announced his bizarre career shift in October. Then, last month, he unveiled his “talent” as a rapper in Las Vegas, falling off the stage after three numbers. His shambolic performance was so preposterously bad, people assumed he was stoned, mentally ill—or perpetrating an elaborate hoax.

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Joaquin Phoenix, Performance Artist?

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 10:33 AM - 13 Comments

Joaquin Phoenix’s appearance on David Letterman last night is already a classic what-the-hell-was-that moment, and it’s got people wondering if it’s real or just staged, Borat-like, for Casey Affleck’s film about Phoenix and his music career. There has already been speculation that the music career is just a hoax and the documentary is intended to be a comedy, and if so, this performance is just part of the gag. But it doesn’t really matter what he’s up to; if this clip is any evidence, the documentary will be a comedy of pain and awkwardness, whether intentionally or not.