Want to read the worst review ever written? I do! I do!
Fair enough — you’re entitled to your own opinion, and it’s definitely valuable to get some insight from Leno’s old 11:30 demographic. Plus to be fair, I didn’t think it was Conan’s strongest show either. Let’s hear your reasoning.
…His decision to do sketch upon sketch instead of a tight monologue with smart topical humor was, at times, painfully unfunny.
[She describes this video, then concludes...] He finally arrived at the new studio, where he realized he’d left his keys in his NYC apartment. Again, it wasn’t worth the months of waiting.
The video, in which Conan epically runs across the entire country that includes shots from about a dozen different locations and clearly took weeks to film and produce wasn’t worth the “months of waiting,” but a monologue with “smart topical humor” would have been? A monologue, which every late night host opens with on every night of every show would have been preferable to a once-in-a-lifetime sketch opportunity? Interesting argument. Also, wondering whether a joke is “worth the months of waiting” as it’s happening is usually a recipe for enjoying that joke.
After the jump, the article gets worse, ending with the least accurate sentence ever written:
Go on.
Then he showed himself acclimating to Los Angeles sitting in the last row of a Lakers game, and then giving a Universal Studio tour in a tram. Again, not a million big laughs.
His thirty-second Laker game video failed to get “a million big laughs” – what a loser! Leno’s “Jay Walking” segments always got a million big laughs. Literally one million laughs that were big. Whenever Leno did a joke, a million big laughs would happen, and that is the standard by which comedy should be judged: a million big laughs or NOTHING.
Finally, out came the first — and only — sit-down guest, Will Ferrell, whose comedy immediately turned excruciating. He was there, it seemed, only to promote his upcoming “Land of the Lost”…
What an asshole! You mean he just showed up on the talk show to promote something? What does he think the Tonight Show is, the premiere vehicle for stars to promote projects over the past fifty years? If you want to promote something, Ferrell, do it on Mythbusters and stop wasting the Tonight Show’s valuable smart topical humor time.
…That allowed Ferrell to answer, “Don’t get me wrong, I’m pulling for you man.” We all are, but so far, all I’m feeling is Leno deprivation.
“So far, all I’m feeling is Leno deprivation.” Wow. First off, anyone who says this sentence shouldn’t be telling other people what they believe about anything. Second, “So far?” Leno has been off the air since FRIDAY. A damn heroin addict wouldn’t be feeling deprivation this soon. Good luck making it through July without Leno’s glorious ZooTube segments.
Then, the absolute best line of the article, and maybe in any article ever:
Bottom line? Conan fans wont be disappointed — it’s Conan the frat guy — just earlier.
“Conan the frat guy”. Conan. The. Frat. Guy. You really don’t know anything about anything, do you?
Conan is a tall, lanky nerd indulging in geeky, brainy, absurd humor for an audience of people who grew up enjoying geeky, brainy, absurd humor. He is by definition the EXACT OPPOSITE of a frat guy, and your broad characterization as such is essentially an admission that you’ve never watched Conan before, you know nothing about him or what he does, and that you basically consider anything vaguely associated with a younger crowd to be automatically low-brow, when in fact, Conan’s deliberate absurdity is light years beyond anything Leno has ever done in terms of intellectual humor, ambition, and challenging the audience.
This last part skids way past opinion and into factual territory; Leno does safe, predictable comedy for a very large audience of people who tune in to see safe, predictable comedy. There’s nothing wrong with that — I’m never going to rip on my fifty-year-old uncle for not DVRing Tim & Eric Awesome Show. But to characterize Conan and his humor as “fratty,” which connotes some sort of low-brow, coarse, dude-humor, with the implied association that Leno’s comedy is more intellectual, then, well, you just shouldn’t be writing for a newspaper.
Well, I guess technically, you kind of don’t.
