Jay Leno

Obama on “Leno”

The president dishes on Republican obstructionism and his feelings about the protest movement VIDEO

(Credit: NBC)

President Obama took a detour through late-night television yesterday evening for an hour-long conversation with Jay Leno that touched on matters of both domestic and international import. Also, the Kardashians.

After hashing through a variety of foreign policy issues in the first portion of the interview (which you can see here), the conversation’s focus shifted stateside. Among the issues Leno and Obama tackled were Republican obstructionism,  executive orders, and Occupy Wall Street. On the last point, Obama continued in his efforts to tap into the growing anger of the 99 percent:

The American people feel like nobody’s looking out for them right now. Traditionally, what held this country together was this notion that if you work hard, if you’re playing by the rules, if you’re responsible, if you’re looking out for your family, you’re showing up for work everyday and doing a good job, you’ve got a chance to get ahead and succeed. Right now, it feels to people like the deck’s stacked against them, and the folks in power don’t seem to be paying attention to that.

If everybody’s tuned into that message — and we are working every single day to figure out how do we give people a fair shake, and everybody’s doing their fair share — then people won’t be occupying the streets, because they’ll have a job and they’ll feel like they’re able to get ahead. But right now they’re frustrated. Part of my job over the next year is to make sure, if they’re not seeing it out of Congress, at minimum they’re going to see in their president someone who’s fighting for them.

Today’s must-see viral videos

Jay Leno loses his crowd, "Glee" knights itself into memehood, and we learn the true meaning of Independence Day

1. “Independence Day” on Independence Day

While most of us spent July 4th blowing up fireworks to celebrate our emancipation from the Brits, comedian Sean Kleier made us remember the true meaning of Independence Day by reciting Bill Pullman’s speech from the movie all over New York City.

 

2. “Glee” goes viral

The stars of the Fox musical stopped by Internet star Keenan Cahill’s to cover Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night.

 

3. Field of “NFL” Dreams

Taylor Lautner in a FunnyorDie video spoof of the Kevin Costner flick. Well, it’s nice to see those “Twilight” kids getting work these days.

4. Jay Leno bombs while talking about the Casey Anthony verdict

HELLO IS THIS THING ON?

 

5. Harry Potter houses

You know, I always wondered what those Hufflepuffs were good for, anyway.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew.

Jay Leno bombs with Casey Anthony jokes

Unfunny at the best of times, Leno made us wish for Stewart and Colbert to return from vacation

Casey Anthony talks with a supporter in court following the end of her murder trial where she was acquitted of murder charges in Orlando, Fla. Tuesday, July 5, 2011. Anthony had been charged with killing her daughter, Caylee. (AP Photo/Red Huber, Pool)(Credit: AP)

On Tuesday night, Jay Leno reminded us not to watch late night comedy shows when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are off the air on vacation.

The Tonight Show host opened with a few cracks about the Casey Anthony verdict:

“It was so hot today, people were as delirious and incoherent as a Florida jury,” he “quipped,” he then tried to deliver a second joke — “This [verdict] means President Obama’s economic team is only the second most clueless group of people in America,” — which he had to repeat because his audience failed to laugh first time around.

We invite you to cringe with us:

Natasha Lennard covers the Occupy movement for Salon. A British-born, Brooklyn-based journalist, she has been covering Occupy Wall Street since before the first sleeping bag was unrolled in Zuccotti Park. One of the first journalists arrested at an Occupy action, she has managed to enrage Andrew Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. You can follow her on Twitter (@natashalennard), and email her any Occupy updates/videos/ideas to natasha.lennard@gmail.com

Today’s must-see viral videos

Watch: The Tea Party gets a trailer, Louis C.K. will trade sexual acts for pills, and Obama lends his car phone

President Obama lets a kid use his telephone to call whoever he wants.

1. White Whines: The rap

Technically this is called “First World Rap,” but that’s just being politically correct. Running out of organic milk? Having your computer charger all the way on the other side of the room? Those complaints need to be sent directly to the ministry of this.

 

2. Louis C.K.’s pro-drug stance

“I just love being high,” the comedian told Leno Wednesday night. He then admits he would suck dick to get his Percoset back. Right before he wishes he was an alcoholic. I love Louis C.K.

 

3. Tea Party tries for TV

Members of the Tea Party movement created their own pilot, called “Courage, New Hampshire.” It still needs to find a network home, but when it does, watch out, world! It’s going to be like “The West Wing,” but without the lefty politics and also set in the 1770s (which we all know is what people are referring to when they say “the good ol’ days”).

I like the part where it just cuts to a dude saying, “If it pleases the court!”

4. Barack Obama lets a kid use his car phone

And no offense to this child, but he totally blows his chance to have the president leave his mom a voice mail. Obama’s face is so giddy in this, you’d think he was doing an episode of “Punk’d.”

 

5. Anderson Cooper, king of sarcasm, will still not give blessing to 51-year-old Doug Hutchison marrying a 16-year-old

It’s never been so much fun to watch someone on TV have a live-action flame war with a blog.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew.

“Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop”: Backstage with Coco

A fascinating backstage documentary probes the egomaniacal comedian's "despair" after a $45 million payday

Conan O'Brien

“I’m sick of people saying that I’m drunk with power! Or that I’ve lost perspective!” shouts Conan O’Brien at his sycophantic staff, during one of many moments of edgy backstage needling in Rodman Flender’s documentary “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop.” Yeah, it’s a joke, of course. But it also represents a vein of uncomfortable humor that runs all the way through this fascinating film, a chronicle of O’Brien’s “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television” tour, which brought the comedian’s traveling vaudeville act to 32 North American cities during his six-month, post-”Tonight Show” banishment from the small screen last year.

It’s also a joke, I guess, when O’Brien later compares himself to Anne Frank, leading his assistant, Sona Movsesian, to gape at him in open-mouthed disbelief. He grumbles his acknowledgment that she’s right, it may be going too far to compare being paid $45 million not to appear on TV with being killed by the Nazis, and you see a flicker of distaste or unhappiness move across his truculent expression. Like: Am I really this person now? Success in show business demands an obsessive, even maniacal drive, along with a diva-ish degree of self-regard and a projection of your own will onto the universe. It should be no surprise that O’Brien possesses all those qualities, despite a public persona based on his humility and upper-middle-class ordinariness. I think the guy is a talented and often funny TV performer, and I’ve got nothing against him as a person. Either bravely or stupidly, he allowed Flender total freedom to make a movie that simultaneously portrays him as a vulnerable human being and also as a massively entitled douchebag who’s being eaten alive by his own contradictions.

If there’s one belief that all Americans share — Jew and Gentile, black and white, Kenyan-born Muslim socialists and normal people — it’s that one day we’ll become celebrities and millionaires. “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” may serve as partial inoculation against that desire, but if it winds up happening to you anyway, here’s my advice: Don’t let the documentary film crew into your house! And if you simply can’t resist, at least stay off the couch, which is where O’Brien spends much of this film (both literally and figuratively), making pronouncements like: “I could be a genius, or I could be the biggest dick ever. Or both. I can’t tell.” Flender’s title has obvious multiple meanings, but one of the biggest is that O’Brien can’t stop running his damn mouth, to his own detriment.

Flender’s film follows in the “direct cinema” tradition of legendary backstage documentaries like D.A. Pennebaker’s “Dont Look Back” (about Bob Dylan in England) or the Maysles brothers’ “Gimme Shelter” (about the Rolling Stones’ infamous Altamont concert). It casts a cold eye at the sausage-making machinery behind the entertainment industry, and if the principal audience for “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” is obviously the comedian’s legions of fans, it’s probably most interesting as a detached study of the workings of fame. We watch O’Brien and his staff tirelessly constructing their road show, a raucous blend of comedy sketches and mediocre folk-rock that feels like a way of reconstructing the star’s ego by way of old-school showbiz bona fides. (Not sure the guy should quit his comedy gig for music, but my gosh, he’s a dervish!) We see him irritably engaging hordes of fans in L.A. and New York, and groups of two or three people in Oregon and rural Alberta. In that last location, he meets a kid who’s driven for hours across the prairie with a fake ID, who tells him, “I hope they don’t Jew me out of getting into the show!” O’Brien calmly asks him what he just said, and the kid goes, “I mean, I hope they don’t gyp me out of it!” (Marginally less toxic bigotry! Much better.)

Let me admit that I came to “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” as a neutral in the great late-night war of 2009-2010. I mean, I’ve seen both O’Brien and Jay Leno on television, and many people I know have strong feelings about the perceived generational and cultural divide between them. But the fact that there were actual street demonstrations on both coasts around the question of who would host the “Tonight Show” (which seemed antique when Johnny Carson hosted it in the ’80s) seems puzzling, although no more so, I guess, than setting fire to police cars because your team either won or lost the championship. What’s clear from the film is that there’s a massive, almost tribal demand for O’Brien’s brand of slightly more upscale comedy (maybe less so for his rock-star stylings), and also that being that famous doesn’t do wonders for anyone’s personality.

There’s a scene late in the movie that made me feel a little better about O’Brien, when he gets dragged into praying to Jesus with a carload of enormous women at a Connecticut gas station. They’re the most obvious targets for a mean crack you could imagine, but either O’Brien held his tongue after the episode was over or Flender had the good sense to turn the camera off. Either way it’s one of those moments in documentary where you’re grateful for a little restraint. He also tells the women that he feels ultimately grateful for getting fired by NBC, when he’s spent much of the movie complaining about the “anger” and “despair” he felt after being paid tons of money rather than agreeing to move his TV show half an hour later. After the tour’s over, he tells Flender, he needs to take some time off and reconnect, maybe drive his kids to school. Then he leans into the camera to correct himself: “Or have my agent drive my kids to school!” In fact, he started working on his new show for TBS almost immediately.

“Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” opens this week in Albany, N.Y., Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Nashville, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., Sacramento, Calif., St. Louis, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, with more cities to follow.

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Jay Leno’s all-purpose commencement address

Comedian's speech to the Class of 2011 is more like an episode from "America's Funniest Home Videos"

Graduation season is not quite over yet. For those of you who haven’t heard a commencement speech this year, Jay Leno obligingly performed an all-purpose one last night — intercutting familiar, clichéd phrases (“Hold your head high and your feet firmly planted,” “You wear your education on your sleeve”) with cringeworthy home videos of college-student escapades. See it here:

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Emma Mustich is a Salon contributor. Follow her on Twitter: @emustich.

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