This admission will date me, but I remember being a kid and hearing the audience laughter from The Tonight Show wafting from my parents’ room, sprinkled with occasional chuckles from my father. Actually, they usually watched Dick Cavett, Johnny Carson’s more highbrow competitor over at ABC. Cavett was prone to intellectual duals with his guests, pulling allusions of his hat (well, his thinking cap) the way a magician produces rabbits. Carson, though, is where it was at. He was funny, with no strings attached. There was that priceless expression he made when one of his regularly appearing exotic animals crawled up his arm; and what about his alter-ego the Amazing Carnac, who, after tripping on the stair on his way to the desk, would amaze the audience with clairvoyant comedy? What happened to talk-show classicism? Was it the last gasp of the Rat Pack era? Actually, it’s the very same thing that happened to film noir. It’s a style frozen in time -- defrost it, and it simply doesn’t taste like reality. In noir, that stilted, “go on – beat it” school of dialog could never make a comeback without sounding like homage, satire or an unconvincing anachronism. And The Tonight Show, with its template of desk, backdrop, monologue and nightclub band, was the last of its kind. When David Letterman came along to grab the torch, he replicated those trappings, but he did it as parody. I mean, who says you have to have a band on a talk show? Why does the host have to sit on the right? Is it the law that in order to get your talk-show license you have to begin with a monologue?
With Letterman arrived talk-show postmodernism. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary refers to postmodernism as "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions.” Letterman had all of the conventions, and his way of drawing attention to the inanity of talk-show “segments” was to bring in velcro suits, toast on a stick and stupid pet tricks. That these irreverent concepts took on a life of their own is a phenomenon that’s redefined the genre. It’s important to note that before Letterman came on the scene, there was a series called Fernwood Tonight, a brilliant mock-talk-show offshoot of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Though it was 100% spoof, with actors playing everybody from the host to the band leader, to the guests, Fernwood may have been the first series to send up the schlocky trappings of the American talk show.
These days, we have a brand-new generation of hosts, the kind who’ve probably made you ask yourself at least once whether these days they’ll give a talk show to just about anybody. It’s important to establish that Letterman is really the only genius, the only host with the wit of a comedic artist, on TV. Jay Leno -– perhaps the only performer who doesn’t pitch his show as a satire – is a one-of-a-kind observer of human stupidity. He can joke about dumb things almost lovably. And now, with his revolutionary attempt to catch the audience-share worm by being a comedy earlybird, Leno at least deserves credit for trying to shake things up. It’s about time. (Specifically, 9 p.m in the central zone.) Conan O’Brien, a postmodernist if there ever was one, takes the larger-than-life glitz of the talk-show gig and deflates it down to everyday size. He behaves like a shy nerd after two beers at a frat party; the kind of guy who’ll suddenly do monster impersonations. And it’s dangerous out there in Talk Show Land. The later you go, the more perilous the host. NBC’s Carson Daly, who’s never claimed to be a comedian, comes across as your unassuming beer buddy. His program is edgier than most, with an emphasis on the new music that’s always been his strong point. But Daly is a casebook study of the unqualified talk-show figure, and not only because he’s trying to transcend his gifts by being funny. Daly acts like he’s had 20 years of seasoning. And most excruciating is the hipness factor. Daly is just a regular dude, but he talks to every guest, particularly the more famous ones, as though they hang out all the time, like they go to concerts together. He makes you long for those gapped Letterman fangs. Jimmy Kimmel, on ABC, restores some Rat Pack class to the art of the talk show. Still, like the others, he copies too much Letterman. His commentary on video clips is dryly funny, however, and he gains points for being close to Sarah Silverman. Then there’s CBS’s Craig Ferguson, who has an amazing wit, the distracting habit of letting his comedy off the leash during interviews, and occasionally teeters on the edge of becoming an obnoxious guest at his own party. Still, Ferguson deserves credit for being a different kind of host, and not only because he’s Scottish. Actually, it’s easier to understand his uncompromisingly thick brogue than the mumbling of NBC’s Jimmy Fallon. Reportedly, the weirdly frenetic ex-SNL performer is performing quite well in the ratings. Eventually Fallon might have a good talk-show, but at this point he’s the perfect exemplar of the friendly-but-smug postmodernist smart-aleck. To be sure, “smart-aleck” is an antiquated term. But it holds up. So does the talk-show format, of course – but while we used to laugh with them, now we laugh at them. And there is nothing funny about that.
Jordan Oakes is a local journalist who has written for publications such as St. Louis Magazine and the Christian Science Monitor. He has strong opinions that begin to atrophy if he doesn't exercise his right to express them. Tune in every Wednesday for another installment of Mediatribe - and if you missed last week's post, click here.
