Jay and Sarah and Dave and Mitt

So, in direct opposition to my "only pop culture post" below, I am going to go again.  Sarah Palin was on Jay Leno tonight, and Mitt Romney was on Letterman.  And even though I dislike to loathe 75% of that crew, I felt obligated as a fan of late night, and observer of our politics, and- most importantly- as a lazy, lazy man to not get off the couch and instead flip back and forth.

Let's start with Palin on Leno.  Hopefully I will be able to get to her stand-up routine.  I am not drinking tonight, though, so I am unsure I can handle it emotionally.  I'll see if I can get there.  Palin came on, in jeans and some kind of sweater, and had her "hey how ya' doin'?" thing going on.  It was folksy and charming, I guess, if you didn't know what a seething ball of vindictiveness and cognitive-dissonance lay beneath the faux-rusticism.  But she immediately launched into stale responses to boring questions about the media (essentially, and unchallenged: she joined Fox because the mainstream media mixes opinion with reporting.  Straight face on that.) and about what Americans want, and how she is out there looking for common-sense solutions.   It was pablum, but she does deliver pablum with a searing intensity.  It is because she really believes it, I think- she is unable to think beyond derivative nonsense, and that endows her with an integrity that can't be faked, regardless of the morality or heft behind the words.

So it is a commercial- let us jump to the candidate for whom "can't be faked" has no meaning: Mitt "Mitt" Romney.  Him and Dave used the first segment to talk about what it was like to have a famous father, a car executive, and a few other softballs.  Romney was charming, and even funny.  We've seen this before with Dave- first segment is soft, then he goes into politics.  I found myself liking Romney, especially in comparison with Palin.  He told good stories about the beat-up hand-me-down cars that he got, despite (or because of) his father's position, and how he put racing stripes on one of them to be cool. (Dave: "Look out chicks!")  He ended by talking about the airplane attack, with a well-delivered "he broke my hair."  I don't know if he has used this before, but it was new to me, and I actually laughed out loud.  Commercial.

Probably the Only Pop Culture Post

I was reading last night when I had a strange tickle in my head reminding me that late night TV became suddenly hackier.  Jay Leno was back on the Tonight Show.  Although, if pressed, I would say it doesn't matter, I found myself caring a lot about the Conan/Jay imbroglio, as a matter of taste, principle and class.  Mostly taste, though- it isn't making a new point to say that Leno is boring and lazy, and that when your comedy consists of typos, misprints and people not knowing who won the Civil War, you aren't a comedian as much as a presenter.

But anyway, because I did care about that, I turned on NBC to see what exactly the new Leno show was going to be.  It was pretty lame, of course, though Jay did seem to be making a point of not making a big deal out of it.   I got bored quickly, and flipped back and forth between him and Letterman.

Jamie Foxx was Leno's first guest, and it was an embarrassment.  I guess I always vaguely liked Jamie Foxx, mostly because of the great Collateral, but have never really thought about him.  He came running out with a mic, imploring the crowd to yell "Back!" after he prompted them with "WELCOME!"  Crowd interaction is nice, and he seemed pleasant, but it all seemed so forced, and soulless, and a cringe-inducing amount of hype about something that everyone kind of wanted to ignore.

Contrast that with Letterman and his guest, the great Bill Murray.   Murray was goofy, in shorts and a spangled ice-skater's top and a Russian hat, with a bad leg in a sling descended from the ceiling.  That sounds over-the-top, but he did it with his sardonic, subtle dead-pan, and it was oddly not at all distracting or easy.  I am not just comparing guests- Murray is incomparable- but the style of the shows.  On Dave you had two legends who have gracefully aged, embracing their quirks, comfortable in their own skins.  There was an air of comfort and mutual respect.  It was almost like watching two old friends.

My point is this: is such an atmosphere even remotely imaginable in the blow-dried promotion machine of Jay Leno's show?   Is there any respect or warmth between guest and host, outside of their duties as interviewer and showman?  I think that is the difference between the two hosts- one is a comedian, all personality, for good and ill, fine with being cranky, unable to be anything but himself.  The other is a marketer, seemingly a mashhup of committee-thinking, the bottom-line brought to life, a Burbank golem.

If you need any further proof of the baseness of Jay Leno, his guests this week include Sarah Palin and Brett Favre.  To paraphrase LA Confidential, a movie whose take on artifice is an excellent presage of Leno, I wouldn't watch that for all the whiskey in Ireland.