Jay Leno is wrong about late-night — it’s always been political

Well, it finally happened. Somebody asked Jay Leno, late-night’s blandest clown, to share his opinions concerning late-night’s decline. In the wake of CBS forcing Stephen Colbert’s early retirement from “The Late Show,” every other major performer has weighed in on the genre’s worrisome state. Surely the man who held “The Tonight Show” in a death grip for 22 years has some thoughts.

And Leno did not disappoint! Five days after CBS’s late-night massacre, a two-minute social media cutdown of a recent interview made it appear that Leno implied Colbert and the rest had nobody to blame but themselves.

“I don’t think anybody wants to hear a lecture,” says the man whose monologues Vanity Fair once summed up as half an hour of “delivering way too many jokes in the hope that some of them will stick.”

“Why shoot for just half an audience?” Leno continued. “. . . Why not try to get the whole? I like to bring people into the big picture. I don’t understand why you would alienate one particular group. Or, just don’t do it at all. I’m not saying you have to throw your support. But just do what’s funny.”

Let’s rewind a bit. These outtakes were from Leno’s conversation with David Trulio, the president and CEO of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, which was recorded a couple of weeks ago.

There’s no way that Leno could have known CBS planned to end “The Late Show” when he made those comments. Instead, it looks like the Foundation’s social media team seized an opportunity to grab some attention.

“Late-night TV used to be about laughs — not lectures,” reads the accompanying summary on the Foundation’s Facebook video. “Jay Leno tells us why he never shared his political opinions on ‘The Tonight Show,’ and why he thinks today’s hosts are losing half of America by doing so.”

The full interview was posted to YouTube on July 27 and casts a slightly different shading on Leno’s comments. In context, he wasn’t taking any individual to task or saying anything he hadn’t already shared on a 2019 episode of “Today” or elsewhere. All told, he comes off like a cheerful 75-year-old man reminiscing about his chit-chats with world leaders.

At the same time, it reminds us that Leno, the dude who media reporter Bill Carter alleged hid in a closet to spy on NBC executives and strategically brown-nosed his way into the “Tonight Show” job from there, knows what his audience wants to hear.

Trulio is the head of the organization dedicated to preserving the fairy tale of Reagan’s legacy as a unifier, as opposed to the man who laid the foundation for the MAGA movement. Therefore, Leno was happy to uphold the myth of Reagan as a harmless old jelly bean, joining all the Fox News uncles out there in recalling the good old days.

You know, when there were only three channels, everybody fell asleep to Carson, and a person’s politics was simply a difference of opinion instead of the existential threat one side poses to everyone who doesn’t agree with them.

Back then, Leno said, late-night japes were “a gentle prod.” Now, “it’s gotten, good or bad, just really political.”

In the interview, Trulio praises Leno for supposedly taking an equal number of shots at Republicans and Democrats. Leno, the guy who sabotaged Conan O’Brien’s chance to succeed in hosting “The Tonight Show,” affirms that fantasy.

During his “Tonight Show” reign, “I got hate letters saying, ‘Dear Mr. Leno, you and your Republican friends . . .’ and another saying, ‘Well, Mr. Leno, I hope you and your Democratic buddies are happy’ over the same joke,” Leno says. “That’s how you get a whole audience. Now, you have to be content with half the audience, because you have to give your opinion.”

(Greg Doherty/Getty Images for Byron Allen/Allen Media Group) Jay Leno

“How did we get to this place?” Trulio goes on to ask Leno. “Do you have advice for comedians today to sort of bring it back to something?”

Leno’s sage advice is to pretend partisanship doesn’t exist, citing his decades-long relationship with a famous peer.

“Rodney Dangerfield and I were friends. I knew Rodney for 40 years. I have no idea if he was Democrat or Republican . . . We just discussed jokes,” Leno said. “And to me, I like to think that people come to a comedy show to kind of get away from the pressures of life, whatever it might be.”

“And I love political humor, don’t get me wrong,” Leno continued. “But what happens is people wind up cozying too much to one side or the other.”

Meaning no disrespect to the late “Rappin’ Rodney” emcee – Dangerfield died in 2004 – he didn’t witness right-wing polarization metastasize across popular culture.

In 2004, Fox News was riding high as George W. Bush’s main propaganda engine. Facebook was a newborn. Hell, social media as we know it was a zygote. Those forces are far more to blame for dividing audiences than any bedtime swipes by broadcast late-night hosts.

For most of the prior decade, Leno’s only competition was David Letterman on CBS’ “Late Show.” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” didn’t arrive until 2003. All the broadcast hosts held to Carson’s supposed tradition of treading lightly around the heavier side of national politics. That left the job of pummeling right-wing hypocrisy to Jon Stewart (and Colbert, in an earlier guise) on Comedy Central and Bill Maher on HBO.

Whether Leno’s comedy was better for that is a matter of varied opinion. To many, he’s still a national treasure. As for others, comics and TV writer Gerry Duggan said it best by way of his “Downfall” meme in 2010: “Every night before bed, Jay Leno kicks comedy right in the d**k and then cr*ps on its chest.”

But there was never a time when Leno stayed silent on political scandals. Carson didn’t either. Reagan’s darkest chapter, the Iran-Contra scandal, was “great for material,” Carson told his audience at the time. One of his zingers repeated by The Washington Post was, ”Well I guess the question now is, ‘What did the President know, and when did he decide he didn’t know it?'”

Former Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart’s extramarital dalliance — on a yacht called Monkey Business, no less — kept Carson’s audience rolling for weeks. ”The way things are going with the other six candidates, the nomination could fall into Gary Hart’s lap,” Carson quipped in 1987. ”If there’s room, of course, in his lap.”

Granted, a politician’s consensual hanky-panky is low stakes compared to, say, darkly joking about the current president’s impromptu golf trip to distract from people from digging into his close, personal relationship to a notorious sex trafficker and pedophile. But opining that late-night’s problems could be solved by its hosts taking up fiddling instead of calling attention to the malevolent arsonists setting fire to the nation only proves Leno hasn’t looked around much lately. Leno wants his peers to return to a middle ground that crumbled to dust years ago.

None of the headliners at Joe Rogan’s Comedy Mothership is stopping to ask himself, “Would Rodney Dangerfield approve of all the slurs I’m about to pop off here?” Dangerfield very well might have, but that’s not the point. Rogan’s acolytes ascended to fame via podcasting, a medium that thrives on outrage and tribalism and is contributing to broadcast’s viewership decline.

If anything, the broadcast network hosts that came after Leno and Letterman have responded to this partisan shift responsibly. That is, they call out the president’s many moral wrongs and absurdities while maintaining the late-night talk show tradition of pulling their punches. The “whole audience” hasn’t been available to them since Leno left “The Tonight Show” for the first time in 2009.

Besides, treating topical humor in the same way that a toothless, mangy mutt gums a dumpster bone is not the same as maintaining neutrality. Contrary to his claims, Leno never was. A study compiled by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University in 2014, coinciding with Leno’s second and final “Tonight Show” retirement, calculated that Leno made 4607 jokes about Bill Clinton versus the 3239 he made about George W. Bush, his second most popular political target.

That 1368 yuk difference might not seem like much, especially when you see who else made Leno’s Top 10. He razzed Al Gore 1026 times, according to the study’s count. Barack Obama inspired 1011 punchlines. He dinged Hillary Clinton 939 times, walloped Dick Cheney 673 times, and went after Monica Lewinsky (454), Bob Dole (452), John McCain (426) and Mitt Romney (361) with similar frequency.

Math tells us Leno was around 22% more likely to take shots at Democrats – not an extreme imbalance, but certainly off-plumb. Data tells the smallest part of the story, though. It’s the content and intent of each bit that matter most, along with the choice of targets.

During Leno’s 2019 “Today” show visit, he said, “I just like to see a bit of civility come back” to late-night. Soon after that, “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” reminded his viewers of how uncivil Leno was toward Lewinsky in an episode about public shaming. As Oliver points out, Lewinsky wasn’t an elected official, had no political power and was still a 20-something intern when her affair with Bill Clinton became household knowledge. That made no difference to the world’s comedians. Especially Leno.

Indeed, Lewinsky drew more of Leno’s fire than Osama Bin Laden, according to that George Mason University survey.

In response to an archival “Tonight Show” clip featuring Leno snorting at a fake Dr Seuss book titled, “The Slut in the Hat,” Oliver replies, “If that’s what he means by civility, may I offer my new book: ‘Oh the Places You Can Go F**k Yourself, Jay Leno!’”

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In the spirit of being fairer to the man than he was to others, I’ll also point out that Leno admitted in that same “Today” segment that his late-night approach wouldn’t work under Trump. “I did it when, you know, Clinton was horny and Bush was dumb, and it was just a little easier,” he observed. “Now it’s all very serious . . . People say it must be easy to do jokes with Trump. No, it’s actually harder. Because the joke used to be, ‘That’s like the President is with a porn star.’ Well, the President is with a porn star.”

When he ruled “The Tonight Show,” Leno said, his approach was to “just watch the news, make fun of the news and get your mind off the news.” That’s impossible when every headline chronicles this administration’s brazen dismantling of democracy. Needling Trump every night is truly the least that Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, Colbert and Oliver can do to make the endless stream of bad news go down a little easier.

Leno’s “Tonight Show” successor, Jimmy Fallon, does less and steadily holds second place in the late-night ratings. We might never know if Leno sees that as validating, but frankly, who cares? If Leno had something to offer beyond an outdated frame of reference, he’d have a streaming series like O’Brien or Letterman.

It’s equally likely that Leno’s content to spend his retirement in his garage, occasionally holding court amid his hundreds of cars and motorcycles. That sounds a lot like the way Carson lived, based on the way a 1978 New Yorker profile summed up the venerated host’s jovial froideur.

“One often gets the feeling that Carson is doubly insulated against reality,” it reads. “Events in the world outside Burbank and Bel Air impinge on him only when they have been filtered through magazines and newspapers and then subjected to a second screening by his writers and researchers. Hence his uncanny detachment, as of a man sequestered from the everyday problems with which most of us grapple.”

Most of us don’t have that luxury, including the guys Leno seems to think are doing his old job wrong.