Is there anything more painful than what is now shaping up as Jay Leno’s forced exit from NBC? There are three bottom lines: 1. Leno is being put out to pasture from late Night due to a (long-overdue) generation shift in a franchise that reached its peak during the days of Johnny Carson and has been in decline in terms of status and its role in American culture ever since. 2. Leno is lashing out at his bosses in his comedy, and while late night comedians poking fun at their network is not new, there clearly is anger and a seeming dose of self-pity here. 3. Leno has in many ways gotten a bum rap from the media.
But The Atlantic Wire’s Connor Simpson gets it right:
Jay Leno capped off his week of wah wah, pity me tour of jokes over reports he’s getting pushed out as host of the The Tonight Show by comparing himself to someone who has been stabbed in the back. Jay Leno seriously thinks we pity him.
AND:
Leno told the story of a Canadian man who recently had doctors remove a knife from his back after it had been there for three years. “Imagine that. The guy had a knife in his back for three years. He must have worked at NBC too,” Leno zinged. Amid reports he sat down for dinner with NBC executive Robert Greenblatt — the guy he reportedly exchanged emails with — on Thursday, Leno continued talking about the “feud” and what NBC is doing to make it up to him. “Have you heard about this alleged feud that I’m having with NBC? I think it’s going to be OK,” Leno said. “This is real. I had dinner last night with a bunch of executives. To make it up me, what they did, they are sending my wife and I on an all-expenses-paid Carnival cruise.” Yes, Leno made a poop cruise joke.
We’re not really sure what Leno hopes to accomplish with all this. No one is ever going to take a sympathetic view of him after he betrayed his friend David Letterman to get the job in the first place, and what he put Conan through three years ago. But he’s more than welcome to keep up this behavior so we can watch him flame out and further taint his already-tarnished reputation in a spectacularly embarrassing fashion.
Some thoughts:
And then there’s this.
Leno has a huge car collection. He has been around for a while. If you add the way he got the show, the imagery that exists in the popular about him taking the show back from O’Brien, the love many still have for the more quirky David Letterman, Simpson is 100 percent correct:
Leno isn’t arousing sympathy.
He just seems to be out there now, twisting, slowly, slowly in the wind..
Which, in itself, over time could elicit a few unwanted-by-Leno laughs.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.