I spent the evening liveblogging the returns of "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" over at Variety's strike blog; check it out.
A few highlights:
11:35 -- Nevermind Huckabee. Chingy? Really? Memo to Chingy: Crossing picket lines isn't "crunk." Wait, unless "crunk" is a bad thing. But I don't think it is.
11:36 -- "A Jew, a Christian and a Muslim walk into a bar..." And with that, Leno is pulled off the air for another two months.
Joking. Leno doesn't deliver the punch line, instead adding, "See, I have no idea what they say because there's no writers!"
But wait a minute, isn't that non-joke a joke? Didn't someone write the joke about there not being a joke?
OK, now I'm confusing myself. But somewhere across town, a WGA leader is probably wondering the same thing.
11:37 -- First NBC joke! "Do you know there are actually more people picketing NBC now than watching NBC right now?" (NBC execs are flying down to Boca today for the big annual GE confab. I'm sure the head of turbines just emailed this to Silverman and Graboff.)
11:38 -- Leno explains why he came back: "We have essentially 19 people putting 160 people out of work. We continue to support the Guild. But, I think it's easy to empathise with those people if you see the faces of the people who work here. Like Bob, out lighting guy." Cue obese slob with a flashlight. Oh, below-the-line folk, you're so below-the-line!
11:39 -- Wait, did Leno just out his wife as a scab? Yikes. "I'm doing what I did the say I started. I write jokes and wake my wife up in the middle of the night and say, 'Honey, is this funny?' So if this monologue doesn't work it's my wife's fault."
Yup, there goes Mavis' WGA card. (Mavis gets a big cheer from the crowd.)
...
12:40 -- "With all the late night shows off the air, Americans have been forced to read books and occasionally even speak to one another, which has been horrifying," Conan says. Ahh, if that were only true. Unless, by "reading books," he means, "Watching 'I Love New York 2,'" and by "speaking to one another," he means, "TiVoing 'The Hills' so that you can try to convince your wife that it's a fun show to watch together." (Still trying on that one, BTW.)
12:40 -- Conan gets much more forceful than Jay on the WGA issue: "I want to make this clear, I support their cause -- these are very talented, very creative people who work extremely hard and I believe what they're asking for is fair," he says to applause.
12:41 -- "Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to start by talking about my beard. That's right, I know this looks fake. It looks like it ties on in the back, but believe it or not I actually grew a beard. I never grew a beard in my entire life. I grew it out of solidarity for my writers, and to prove that I have some testosterone.
Truest statement of the night: "The biggest comment I'm getting the last couple of days is that I look like the character of Kris Kringle in 'Santa Claus is Coming to Town.'" (See above; he's right.)
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