Below is an extract of an commodity that originally appeared in RS 1097 from February 4, 2010. This affair and the blow of the Rolling Stone athenaeum are accessible via Rolling Stone Plus, Rolling Stone's exceptional cable plan. If you are already a subscriber, you can click actuality to see the abounding story. Not a member? Click actuality to apprentice added about Rolling Stone Plus.
Jay Leno — he played this one beautifully. Five years ago, if NBC angry Leno into a time bomb by able his job to Conan O'Brien, he ticked quietly, befitting his acerbity to himself — but, oh, how it accept to accept burned. Now he gets to aftertaste the candied ambrosia of vengeance. By sucking so bad that NBC could no best abide him in prime time, he sucked his way appropriate aback into his old job. The tragedy of all this is that NBC has somehow angry two acceptable easily into a lose-the-farm fold.
We've never apparent Conan pissed off before, and it apparel him. Now that he's assuming his claws, he's assuredly proving himself fit for the job just as he walks abroad from it. His agreeableness has consistently been his abnegation to act like we owe him anything; he doesn't accept the all-overs or aberration that drives Jay and Dave. If he did, he'd be unbearable. (Actually, he'd be Norm MacDonald — aforementioned thing.) Early in his career, he got advantageous break because humans admired him. Nobody wants to see a advantageous guy get mad — it's bad manners, and for Conan, bad amenities is bad comedy.
In acerbity mode, Conan is funnier than he's been back affective to 11:35. But it's aberrant to see him coil with Jay. We're acclimated to seeing Letterman acerbity at NBC, CBS and Sarah Palin. Dave thrives on battle — as he joked, he's the artefact of "Lutheran Midwestern guilt." Leno and O'Brien assume like nice Catholic boys, a lot of adequate if everyone's accepting along. Yet abaft Leno's Guy Smiley-Muppet mask, he's a killing apparatus — the Terminator of late-night comedians.
Conan's a biographer and Jay's a performer, and you can't enlarge how altered those mentalities are. Jay got The Tonight Show afterwards accepting up in foreground of adverse drunks in endless shitty late-night dives about the country, year in and year out, and authoritative those assholes laugh. Conan got the job by getting funny in a allowance abounding of added writers. This isn't to slight either of them — but Jay has consistently been tougher and darker than humans realize.
Leno doesn't charge TV. He could just go to Vegas and accomplish added money accomplishing what he loves best, which is stand-up. Last year he told Rolling Stone he banked his Tonight Show money and lived on his actor earnings.
So why did he adhere about NBC continued abundant to accompany the accomplished arrangement down in flames? Maybe he just acquainted pushed around. Leno's got the abdomen for fights. Like Paul McCartney, addition nice guy abominably absolved as a chrism puff, Jay fabricated his basic in the sleaziest, nastiest showbiz bluff pools on earth. He plays nice for the old ladies, but his street-fighting instincts are off the charts. He's larboard affluence of ashes on the late-night highway. Arsenio Hall, Chevy Chase, Magic Johnson — Jay agape them all off the air, and you can bet he still savors the anamnesis of their afterlife cries.
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