Leno’s Art of Late-Show Maintenance by BILL CARTER
New York Times TV WriterPublished: February 4, 2008
For monologues, Jay Leno has retooled his stand-up comic act. Jay Leno has no access to his regular team of 19 writers and must rely on a lineup of guests that seems more appropriate to a daytime cable talk show. Yet after a hiatus forced by the Hollywood writers’ strike, he has maintained his customary position atop the ratings in late-night television.
And he’s winning even though his main competitor, David Letterman, was widely thought to have an advantage: a deal with the Writers Guild of America that brought his writers back and allowed him to book A-list Hollywood guests.
Since the late-night shows returned on Jan. 2, “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on NBC has averaged about 5.2 million viewers while the “Late Show With David Letterman” on CBS has averaged 4.1 million. Last week the disparity was more pronounced, with Mr. Leno pulling in 5 million viewers compared to 3.6 million for Mr. Letterman.
Many of the usual explanations for Mr. Leno’s supremacy still apply. The local news on NBC stations is more popular than the news on CBS stations. In recent weeks NBC’s prime-time schedule, which has faltered in the last few years, has been beating CBS, especially from 10 to 11 p.m. That hour can have the most impact on late-night television.
But with his consistent nightly victories, Mr. Leno has again defied the expectations of detractors, something that has always given him personal satisfaction. Throughout his career he has characterized himself in blue-collar terms, espousing the virtues of hard work and ambition over genius and raw talent. He is also, as many of those who have worked with him attest, among the most competitive performers in television.
The Letterman side says that the advantage of having writers never translated into higher ratings for a simple reason: Mr. Leno is not doing a strike show; he is still doing his regular show. Rick Ludwin, the NBC executive in charge of late-night programs, said, “Jay has delivered the show viewers have come to expect.”
Mr. Leno is performing the opening monologue, his show’s centerpiece, just as he always has, firing off joke after joke — 25 last Thursday alone for example. Many of the jokes were based on the Republican debate the night before. Others were more generic. But to most viewers they probably seemed indistinguishable from a monologue Mr. Leno might have given six months, or six years, ago.
That has led to speculation about how he’s doing it. After all, the Writers Guild put out word that no new writing could be done during the strike. Mr. Leno met with the guild leadership before the strike and explained that he intended to perform a monologue he would write himself.
Though he declined to comment for this article, Mr. Leno has said on the air that the guild sanctioned that approach. One of his writers, who was in the meeting with the guild, supported that point in an earlier interview, saying the guild told Mr. Leno it would not “hassle him.”
The guild has since said that Mr. Leno was not given such permission and is in violation of the strike rules. The union threatened Mr. Leno with disciplinary action but has taken none yet. Asked about where such action stands, a spokesman for the guild, Neal Sacharow, said in an e-mail message, “The guild does not respond to internal matters.”
Meanwhile Mr. Leno continues to work. He has tried to use his meager guest list as part of his comedy, joking about “having another animal act.” (There have been five on the show in a month.) If anything, according to close associates of Mr. Leno and even some of his competitors, the strike seems to have had a liberating effect on him.
“He’s looser,” said the producer of another late-night-show, who asked not to be identified because he doesn’t work for NBC. “It seems like more of that stand-up personality that people always liked in him is coming out.”
That might not seem to account for 25 jokes a night, but Mr. Ludwin and others associated with the show say Mr. Leno’s three decades of work as a stand-up comic has been the biggest factor in those monologues.
These associates say that Mr. Leno is pulling jokes from the deep pool of material he has used in his stand-up act, dropping in more generic — or just silly — jokes into his monologues. “Doctors in China have confirmed the existence of a man who was born with three eyes,” went one. “Three eyes! Today LensCrafters said they can make him glasses in about an hour and a half.”
But he has also, the associates said, used his skills as a mechanic — Mr. Leno’s chief non-show-business passion is working on cars and motorcycles — to retool old jokes. One longtime writer said that Mr. Leno was taking lines he used about earlier politicians and refashioning them to involve contemporary figures.
Some of Mr. Leno’s competitors still question how he is able to do this all by himself, night after night, especially while also darting off to stand-up gigs. Last Wednesday he flew to Phoenix for a Super Bowl-related performance after taping the show earlier that day.
But none of these questions, nor the pressure from the guild, nor the absence of his writers, the dependence on guests like Lester Holt of NBC News instead of Tom Cruise, nor anything else for that matter, seem to be distracting Mr. Leno from his chief mission: winning in late night, week after week.
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And yes I have watched it enough to form an opinion, I happen to prefer Dave over Jay and I am also fairly certain Jay could give a rats azz if I watch or not. 