Tuesday, March 2, 2010
TV Jay Leno Returns to The Tonight Show, Still is Not Funny
Posted by Mike Conklin on Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 12:02 PM
Outside of a few potshots at NBC, he never took the time to address any of the issues that have been making headlines since early January. Nor did he do the classy thing and thank Conan O'Brien for his (admittedly brief and largely forgettable) contributions to the institution that is the Tonight Show. Nor did he make a spirited appeal to his audience, promising that he still has a passion for comedy and for the program and will work tirelessly to return the show to its past glories. Instead, he totally phoned it in this evening on every conceivable level, leaving media critics and audiences alike to wonder whether or not Leno has anything even resembling a competitive spirit left, or if the trials and tribulations of the last year have simply caused permanent and irreparable damage to his spirit and psyche.
But then I remembered that, actually, dialing in his return the way he did is probably the most competitive thing he could have done. We're talking about a man who has managed to sustain a very successful career by catering to an audience full of people with no competitive spirit left. He's gotten rich by appealing to people who want nothing to do with controversy, who don't want to have their ideas of what's funny and what's not called into question—and he gave them exactly what they wanted last night, just as he's always done.
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