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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Sarah Palin is unstoppable

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 196 Comments

Photograph by Sally Ryan/The New York Times/ Redux

John McCain thought he needed to spring one more surprise on America.

In August 2008, his presidential campaign against Barack Obama was listing badly. Some of this was his fault. But after eight years of George W. Bush, anyone representing the Republican party came with a lot of baggage. McCain needed to choose a candidate for vice-president who underlined his reputation as a maverick within the party and who was untainted by close ties to the previous administration. The stakes were high. As John Heilemann and Mark Halperin write in Game Change, their book about the campaign, “If McCain’s running mate selection didn’t fundamentally alter the dynamics of the race, it was lights out.”

McCain’s original plan was to partner with Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic nominee for vice-president. McCain hoped such a choice would prove his bipartisan credentials, steal thunder from his opponents, and back-foot the press­—allowing his campaign to regain some momentum. But when word of the Lieberman plan leaked, much of the Republican party rebelled, and McCain was forced to scramble. “We need to have a transformative, electrifying moment in this campaign,” McCain strategist Steve Schmidt said. No one on the short list of alternative candidates could deliver this. Schmidt suggested a new option: Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

There wasn’t time to vet Palin properly, or to probe her thoughts on foreign and domestic policy. Picking Palin was a Hail Mary pass in the dying seconds of a championship game. But McCain met and liked her. She was confident and calm. She wasn’t afraid to burn bridges and upset people, even in the Republican party. She was an outsider, like him. Steve Schmidt told McCain choosing Palin could hurt him. But a safer candidate, he said, wouldn’t help. It would be better to go for the win and lose big than to tiptoe to a narrow defeat. “High risk, high reward,” another one of McCain’s advisers cautioned. “You shouldn’t have told me that,” McCain replied. “I’ve been a risk taker all my life.”

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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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Conan better keep Jay on the team

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 12, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 4 Comments

On his first episode of The Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien joked that Jay Leno would be coming back to NBC “in two days.” Well, not quite that soon, but starting in the fall, O’Brien’s Tonight predecessor will have a nightly talk show at 10 p.m. This was seen as a sign of NBC executives’ lack of confidence in O’Brien, but they may be doing O’Brien a favour. O’Brien’s first Tonight episode beat David Letterman in the ratings; if Leno had gotten a competing talk-show on another network, he might have beaten Conan, just as he beat everyone else. O’Brien told his audience that Leno is a friend and that “I’m looking forward to him being our lead-in.” It’s better to have him as a lead-in than competition, because audiences prefer the unhip, familiar, comfortable—in short, Jay Leno.

Even Leno’s network didn’t expect him to be this popular for this long. Sue Trowbridge, who runs The Late Night TV Page (a Web resource for finding out the upcoming guests on talk shows), points out that NBC announced O’Brien as Leno’s successor in 2004 “far enough ahead of time that maybe Leno thought that would be a good time to step down.” But “five years passed, and he’s still number one and still enjoying it.” It wasn’t hard to see why NBC might have expected his popularity to decrease: Leno is a dinosaur in a talk-show landscape dominated by people with a hip, ironic take on the format.

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The Tonight Show, now with more smart stupid humour

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 at 1:13 PM - 5 Comments

Conan O’Brien is really, really obsessed with Los Angeles. Or that’s what you’d think after watching his first episode of The Tonight Show. It’s doubtful that most viewers care, or even know, whether a particular talk show is taped on one coast or another, but O’Brien never let us forget it. The opening sketch had him running across the country to get from New York to L.A.; one of his first jokes was about how he’s moved to “a state that’s bankrupt”; when the audience laughed at an L.A. Clippers joke, he commented that he’d learned how to get laughs “in this town.” Even his guest, Will Ferrell, engaged him in a conversation about things to do now that he’s relocated.

The point of all this L.A.-based humour is to portray O’Brien as a fish out of water, an ordinary guy getting used to a new city. The fact that he already lived in L.A. when he wrote for The Simpsons is inconvenient, and therefore never mentioned.

Continuing with the outsider theme, O’Brien presents himself as an upstart turned loose on a respectable showbiz franchise—and a lot of his bits last night were about him looking uncomfortable in stolid, old-fashioned Hollywood, or making mischief by fooling around with show-business institutions (including vandalizing the sacred Hollywood sign). He’s an overgrown kid who’s been given The Tonight Show to play with.

Unlike Jay Leno, who was a confident showbiz insider and a natural performer, O’Brien’s schtick has always been based on the fact that he’s not really a performer, and doesn’t seem comfortable with the conventions of show business. Last night, he laughed sheepishly at his own jokes, good and bad, and he did his trademark move of clasping his hands and bowing, as if debasing himself in front of everyone else. He allowed Ferrell to put him down frequently (though the best line of the night was Ferrell announcing that Liza Minnelli, who will likely beat him out for a Tony, “is a Communist.”)

For some viewers, it may be a jarring change from Leno. While O’Brien is known as the edgier of the two comics, his edginess comes from doing almost childish, infantile humour: he loves silly jokes, like dubbing stupid lines over a clip of Joe Biden, or hauling out old pop-culture icons like Fabio for cameos. Leno’s humour was aimed more at people who wanted to think of themselves as too grown-up for that kind of thing; while Leno’s jokes were not actually smart, they were meant to make the viewer feel smart. Leno fans could listen to his topical political jokes and feel, because they got the jokes, that they were well-informed people; then they’d watch the “Jaywalking” segments and feel smarter than the idiots who couldn’t answer Leno’s questions. That’s the biggest change between Leno and O’Brien: Leno did dumbed-down smart humour for older viewers, while O’Brien does smart stupid humour for younger hipsters. Whether the Tonight Show audience will accept these extra layers of irony is still an open question.

It seems likely that O’Brien will be on The Tonight Show for a while: last night’s ratings were good, NBC likes him, and he knows how to steer a show in the right direction (remember, his first talk show started disastrously). But it’s possible that he may never become an institution like Carson or even Leno, just because he doesn’t have—or want to have—their kind of authority. Those guys were showbiz kings who loved the phony glamour of Hollywood; O’Brien wanted us to know, last night, that he’s not an authority figure, but someone like us who happens to have stumbled into an important job. Of course he’s rich, powerful and loves his job, just like Leno. The difference is that O’Brien is hoping we won’t figure that out.