February 6, 2014. 6:15 a.m. I got up at the usual time, looked at Drudge to see if there were any red flashing sirens heralding a major event. There was nothing major that morning, so I looked at the secondary stories of the day, went to the National Journal Hotline for political news, Fark for odd stories, and TMZ to see whose house Justin Bieber had egged. I started to make my daily list of nine stories (no real reason, just a number I came up with years ago when I started writing) that I thought were ripe for jokes for that night . . . then stopped. We were just hours away from Jay Leno’s last Tonight Show. The monologue for that night was already pretty much locked. There was nothing to do but go in and say good-bye to people I worked with for twenty-two years.
We had a big staff, well over one hundred people—anywhere from fourteen to eighteen writers. Our writers were divided into three types: monologue writers, sketch/taped piece/bit writers, and those like me who went both ways. If you did both, your primary responsibility was the monologue, the bread and butter of the show, but we also came up with bit ideas and contributed to those that were in the works. At the heart of anything we did, whether a joke or a bit, was this: Is it funny?
Which leads to people often asking me, “How did you get to be funny?” Actually, critics ask, “Why do you have a job? You’re not funny.” To the former I tell this story. My dad passed away in 2013. A few months later I was over visiting my mom in her assisted-living place, and when I went into her room there was a ninety-year-old man on a walker talking to her. First thing I said was “Mom, too soon.” Nothing. Crickets. When the gentleman left, I said, “Mom, you could do better, someone more mobile, have you checked if he’s in the Forbes 400?” No reaction. She then said, “Oh, he was here to thank me. When your dad died, he had two boxes of Depends left over. They were sitting in the closet, and George needed them.” I said, “That is so sweet.” She said, “So I sold the Depends to him.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is where the comedy comes from.
All the guys I grew up with were funny; as were, probably, the people you grew up with. The only difference between them and me is that I typed out the funny comments I thought of. It actually started in sixth grade. We had to write a two-page essay about our family. Everyone in Mrs. McMann’s class wrote about their real family. I made up funny stories about an older brother and younger sister who didn’t exist. I got an A-plus. That was the start of comedy writing. So you can either thank or blame Mrs. McMann at Woodland Avenue Junior High after you finish this book.
A lot of people are funny; so how did I end up on late night as Jonny the Joke Boy? After law school—I know, I know, we all make mistakes—I started running political campaigns. After winning my first two campaigns and being on the cover of Philadelphia magazine as one of eighty-one people to watch in ’81 (one of the other people ended up killing a police officer, so I figure I ended up in eightieth place out of eighty-one), I proceeded to lose twenty-three straight races. If I backed the hare, the tortoise won. If I went all in on the tortoise, the hare won. Finally in 1986 a man named Bob Casey ran for governor of Pennsylvania. He had run and lost three times before and was known as the “three-time loss from Holy Cross.” Not many people were rushing out to work for Casey. Meanwhile, no one would hire me, along with another guy named James Carville, who I believe had the same campaign track record as me. We teamed up with Casey, and he won his primary and general election. We were hot stuff, and my wife, Julie, and I and James moved to DC. Not into the same apartment. Get your filthy minds out of the gutter.
I moved up from local campaign hack to being a national political media guru at a top consulting firm named Doak, Shrum and Associates. I was half of the associates, the other being Steve McMahon. The differences between a hack and a consultant are better suits, a company credit card, and having people more likely to believe my bullshit. My friend Donna Brazile said that political consultants back then were all basically fat white guys in suits. I was not fat. We were, however, white boys in suits.
I ended up doing pretty well at national strategy, making TV ads, and handling debate prep, and got to meet some amazing people, as well as a few candidates best described as empty suits. In 1990, one of my clients, Senator Paul Simon, who was not an empty suit, was asked to do the Gridiron speech. The Gridiron, like sex after age sixty, is a much-anticipated, once-a-year event. Except this one has an audience. All the big-deal political reporters put on skits, and then a member of each party, one Democrat and one Republican, are expected to give funny speeches. Paul called me and said, “Jon, you’re funny, write some jokes.”
Paul thought I was funny based on the day when he and I were driving back from a speech he gave, and we passed a car with a bumper sticker that read SAVE A TREE, EAT A BEAVER. Paul suddenly said, “Why would anyone want to eat a beaver?” I did what I do best in moments like this: I pretended to be asleep for the next ten minutes, as Chuck the driver explained the difference between the beaver on the bumper sticker and the furry little creature with big teeth. Silence for the next hour of the drive, as Paul contemplated an act that had not heretofore entered his mind. At the end of the drive, as he got out of the car, he turned to us and said, “I still can’t understand why anyone would eat a beaver.”
Regardless, two things happened. His wife, Jeanne, looked really happy the next time I saw her, and Paul decided I was funny because I laughed at his “I still can’t understand why anyone would eat a beaver” line, so he asked me to write some jokes for the Gridiron.
Here is where it gets interesting. Paul gives the speech and it kills. Mr. Deadpan in the Bowtie is now Shecky Greene. Frank Mankiewicz, who put together the speech, called afterward to say my jokes were great and I ought to do this for a living. At that point I figured maybe that was Frank’s very nice way of saying I was a really bad political consultant.
So that was in the back of my mind in 1991 when I saw Jay Leno perform his stand-up act at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia. I was completely blown away. It was the best stand-up act I ever saw. The timing, the jokes, the performance, the delivery. And his show was timeless, there was nothing topical about it. This was before he had been named to take over The Tonight Show from Johnny. In the Washington Post the morning of Jay’s performance was an article saying Jay bought jokes from freelancers, so, what the hell, I sent in some jokes and got a freelance agreement back in the mail. Whoa! I figured, I’m hot stuff. They must be having big meetings at NBC about me and my incredible talent. Only later did I find out that I was one of nine hundred freelancers who had the standard agreement. If Jay used a joke, I’d get fifty dollars. So I sent in my first batch, and on July 11, 1991, when he was still guest-hosting for Carson, I heard him use one of my jokes.
“There was a solar eclipse today. This throws everything off when it gets dark in the middle of the day. The birds stop chirping. The cows come in from the pasture. The hookers come out on Times Square.”
That was it. The worst joke ever written. And then the check came for fifty dollars. I was a professional comedy writer. I felt like the first girl off the bus from Minneapolis in LA who now gets paid for the sex act she did back home to all the guys for free. I framed the check until my wife said, “Idiot, you make a copy and frame it. Cash the actual check.”
So I kept sending in jokes for the one day a week Jay would guest-host, and he would use one or two a week. Then he was officially named Johnny Carson’s replacement starting the following May, and he did an entire week of shows in October while Johnny took a break. That week he used five of my jokes and sent me a bonus check.
It was fun. I’d write jokes on the plane as I would fly from state to state doing ads in US Senate and governors’ races, go into the hotel, pay the desk clerk ten dollars to let me use his giant forty-foot desktop, type up the jokes I had written on the plane, print them, and fax them to Jay. Then in January 1992 we had our third kid. Not Jay and me—Julie and me. All my kids are blond, I’m dark-skinned with dark hair, and I was on the road three hundred nights a year. Go ask my wife whose they are. It’s too late to get jealous.
I was in Utah on a losing US Senate race when I got a call from Helga in Jay’s office. She said Jay hadn’t gotten my fax that day and could I resend. I said, “I had no idea my jokes meant anything.” She said, “You mean Jay hasn’t called you?” Five minutes later Jay called and said, “Hey, I’m putting together my staff, would you want to be considered?” Not a job offer but a “Would you consider?”
Now, when the job offer actually came it meant giving up a big job as a partner in a top DC consulting firm, to go move across country with three little kids and start a new job in a business that has a 99 percent failure rate. I said, “Sure.”
Three weeks later I was on a TV shoot for a losing candidate for Congress in Virginia (my losing streak was under way again) when my wife called the campaign headquarters. “Jay offered you the job,” she said. “I told him yes.”
I called Jay so that I could actually accept, but had to confess something: I had clients through November and partners, and was worried that might be a deal breaker. He said, “You can do both—fly back and forth, send in jokes, and move out to LA in November.”
I’m thinking, That’s two full-time jobs. That meant I would have to get up every morning at five, write jokes for four hours, work as a political consultant, fly to a new Senate race every other day, finish at nine at night, and then prime the pump by writing jokes for the next day. It was insane. So I said yes.
So I took the job with Jay, did two jobs for six months, moved out to Los Angeles in November 1992, told my partners this would last thirteen weeks and then I’d be back so keep the partnership open. It’s now 2015. I think they’ve given away my office. One thing led to another. Working for Jay gave me the chance over the years to meet and begin working for other comedians. Thanks to a recommendation from my old boss Bob Shrum, Don Mischer hired me to write the Emmys in 1995, then Billy Crystal called and asked me to write the Oscars in 1997. Billy introduced me to Whoopi, who hired me to write her Oscars a year later. Billy passed my name on to Steve Martin, who hired me for when he hosted. Chris Rock called Steve a few years later and hired me on Steve’s recommendation. Steve also recommended me to Marty Short. Billy and a comedy writer and close friend named Dave Boone introduced me to Hugh Jackman in 2005, and Hugh hired me to write the Tonys. So, like the town whore, I got passed around. Many of you are asking, “What’s a town whore?” Usually about fifty dollars.
At this point, I’ve written shows, speeches, bits, monologues, and jokes for all of the above, plus Terry Fator, Eva Longoria, Felicity Huffman, Michael Bublé, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, and Terry Bradshaw. Meanwhile, thanks to my political friends, as of the writing of this book, I’ve written for twenty senators and governors and a few US presidents and vice presidents. But those are fun things I did on the side. In the end, nothing was more important than the mother ship, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
On a typical workday at The Tonight Show I wrote jokes in batches of ten and brought them into Jay’s office every thirty minutes or so. He would read them along with the lines from the other writers and pick ones that were possibly monologue-worthy. He read more than a thousand jokes a day, would pick a hundred or so he liked, and then he and head writer Jack Coen would select the best twenty-five-plus for the monologue. Some were holdovers from the night before, others new from that day. Once they picked the jokes, Jay would go down to rehearse the comedy bits, then go over the monologue, put it in order, and do the show from four to five p.m. It’s what we called a live taping, meaning the mistakes stay in. There’d be a retape if an aging singer forgot the words to his own song. Or if a drugged-out young singer forgot the words to hers. That’s the advantage Britney Spears has—the pretaped recording never forgets.
Some writers like the TV on, have earbuds in, and are listening to Lil Wayne when they type out jokes. For me, I need a computer, a couple newspapers spread out, and total quiet. Not because I’m in that “Shh, genius at work mode.” But because I’m not smart enough to do two things at once.
Every day, by late afternoon, I would have an inkling of how many jokes of mine had made it into the monologue, but I would have to watch to see if they survived whatever final pre-show cut there may have been, and how they worked. Bottom line: if I got five in, it was a fantastic night; four, really good; three, solid; two made me depressed; one had me suicidal; and on the nights when I got nothing in, someone would call my wife and tell her to hide the dog and kids before I got home.
The last show was not typical. We had so many special segments planned, including a Billy Crystal song and tribute to Jay, plus Jay’s farewell at the end, that the monologue was going to be short. Since I figured it would be only about ten jokes long instead of the usual number, I worried I wouldn’t have even one joke on the last show. It’s bad enough to not have any jokes in the monologue on any night, but at least knowing there’s a show the next night can make up for it. Not having any jokes and having no other show to look forward to would be crushing. Yes, I’m that shallow, self-centered, and neurotic. Jay’s last night, and somehow I decide it’s about me. That explains why I’m in show business.
I’m also really superstitious. In twenty-two years I never watched the show from the floor. And it worked. By not going downstairs for the taping, I had a job in show business for more than one thousand consecutive paychecks. Instead I always watched on the TV in my office and continued to work on jokes for the next night, but like the Pesach seder, this night was different from all other nights.
I liked Jay’s last monologue. It had a few jokes about the occasion and a few topical. Jay was halfway through the monologue and hadn’t done any jokes of mine. I had helped Billy Crystal write his tribute to Jay (okay, I typed word for word what Billy dictated over the phone, but that’s close enough to say I was part of his brilliant segment), so I knew I was contributing to the last show, but, still, I wanted at least one joke. Again Mr. Shallow. Then I heard Jay do it . . . my last joke on his show.
“Over the years people want to know if David Letterman and I dislike each other. Not true. We like each other and we’ve had a long relationship. We both realize no one wants to turn on TV and see millionaires fighting. That’s what Republican primaries are for.”
Okay, I had sent in the joke with the word presidential before primaries, and he left it out, but so be it. The joke scored and it was a political joke, one that, given my background, was right in Jay’s wheelhouse and mine.
Later in the show Billy did his tribute and then ended his segment with a great song he and Marc Shaiman put together, with cameos from huge stars like Carol Burnett and Oprah and fake stars like Kim Kardashian. Jay gave a good-bye, Garth Brooks sang us off the air, and that was it.
The wrap party was nice, my wife and I mingled, then we sat with Jay and Mavis Leno and Billy and Janice Crystal until it was time to go. It was the typical crappy LA finger food, so Julie and I went to Dan Tana’s, I had one martini too many, and we went home. Four thousand, six hundred ten Tonight Shows with Jay Leno and it was over.
I was one of eight writers on Jay’s first show on May 25, 1992, and one of only two who made it with him the entire time he was the host. Let’s do the math: 4,610 shows, 100-plus monologue jokes written a day, plus with what I wrote for sketches, it’s about 500,000 jokes. Being a baseball numbers nerd, I kept a count, and about 18,000 of mine made it on the air. Being a bit self-loathing, I prefer to think that means 482,000 jokes are in a landfill somewhere.
Let me take a moment and note for anyone who thinks I am egotistic that I was involved in three shows that Entertainment Weekly and other reviewers called among the worst of all time.
One is the Franco-Hathaway Oscars. Not my fault, not her fault, his fault.
The Emmys hosted by the five reality-show hosts. Four Marx Brothers worked together five-plus nights a week for fourteen years and decided four people onstage was too much, so Zeppo left. Five people, no matter how talented, working together for the first time live are just not going to be a success.
And Jay’s ten o’clock show. Let me just say it was not the best idea NBC ever had. Jay was born for late night.
I think all of us knew deep down it was doomed to fail. But we did find out later that you can un-ring a bell. We went back to where we should have stayed the entire time.
I’m proud of my time with Jay. Somebody once told me I had more jokes on television than any writer in history, but the person who told me that was my manager, David Steinberg, and I pay him. Still, it could be true. I’d like to believe it. Just as I’d like to believe my congressman when he tells me he cares about me and my family. In 2004, Newsday ranked me the sixth-most important player in television influencing coverage of the presidential election, right after Jon Stewart and between Tom Brokaw and Rush Limbaugh. As Marty Short would say, “Jon, it’s safe to say you’re really important; not true, but safe to say.”
What I did isn’t important like what a surgeon does, however being a late-night writer for that long was a unique position to occupy. As a monologue writer on the number-one show for two decades, I read tens of thousands of news stories. It was my decision what to write about and to give a joke the spin I thought would work. There was rarely from Jay any “Don’t do this joke” or “Let’s do jokes on Senator Schmuck.” And when he did nix something, it was only because he had too many from all of us on the same topic. Like the jokes I always sent in when a guy fell into a wood chipper. It happens in LA every three months—a guy gets chopped to pieces, and we comedy writers think it’s hysterical. Goodbye, Mr. Chips. There was no way Jay would ever do those, but we wrote them anyway. And then at some point in the day he’d say, “No more wood-chipper jokes.” It’s a shame, because if we had done the jokes, it would have alerted people to the dangers of wood chippers and those jokes might have saved lives. Which would have made my job as important as a surgeon’s.
So we were on our own in choosing topics, and simply by virtue of that freedom comedy writers have an impact on what kind of jokes will be told. And if I’m only writing jokes about the fact that Barack Obama plays too much golf and has abdicated his job, and if all the other writers are doing the same type of jokes, then those are what Jay and his head writers over the years, Jimmy Brogan and Jack Coen, would have to pick from. Limited topics in, limited topics out. Which is why Jay always wanted and encouraged us to write about anything and everything.
Now, he’s never going to do anything counterintuitive and try to sell people on something that’s not true or not believable, but when it comes to politics, what we produced joke-wise is what made it on the air. And what made it on the air is what had an impact on how people view things.
Not only was my job unique, it was an odd position for me. I had to compartmentalize and often wore two hats professionally, over the years keeping a hand in the political-consulting game. So, on one hand I was a Democrat who worked on John Kerry’s and Barack Obama’s campaigns. On the other, I had no problem zinging Democrats when they screwed up. In fact, I always went the other way and wrote thousands more jokes about Democrats than Republicans. When it comes to politics, I am a pro–gay rights social liberal who supports Medicare and more money for education. But when it comes to jokes, I’m a writer first, Democrat 615th. I gave David Axelrod this line after the one debate in which Hillary tried to show she knew the inner workings of the White House better than Obama: “Barack Obama for president, Hillary Clinton for chief of staff.” I’m also the one who wrote that if we wanted to bring down Iran with economic sanctions, we should give them Obamacare.
Back to the Newsday quote—which is where the idea for this book came from—does Jon Stewart or anyone in late night (including this lowly writer) really have an impact on presidential elections? Does one joke we laugh at before going to bed turn the tide of public thinking?
Are the jokes all of us have watched performed on late-night shows important? Do they matter in the larger sense? Or are all of us who write for late night just immature class clowns too unattractive to be stars in front of the camera? Is it true that as a comedy writer you can look at YouPorn on your work computer and not get in trouble because it’s “research”? The answer to at least two of those questions is yes.
So that’s what this book is (mostly) about. Not the unattractive-writer part, but the larger meaning of how late-night comedy monologues and sketches can influence and impact us. We watch late-night TV for a number of reasons: to forget about the troubles of the day, to avoid having sex, to have something to do after sex, or even during it. But the main reason is to watch the monologue and comedy bits. Let’s be honest, does anyone really stay up until midnight to watch second guest Andrew Garfield talk about the tremendous challenge of playing Spider-Man? Do we really want to hear about how when he was a lonely ten-year-old and all the other kids made fun of him, it was Peter Parker who gave him strength to survive? Zzzzzz. Try telling a kid growing up in Syria how tough your life is, Andrew. And that’s not to single out Andrew Garfield, I think he is a wonderful actor. But does anyone stay up until 12:29 to see some third-rate indie band sing a song that sounds like a song by a third-rate indie band? The drop-off in the number of viewers who stop watching after the monologue and first comedy bit on a late-night show is anywhere from 20 to 30 percent. We stay up for the monologue because it puts things in perspective; then a lot of us go to sleep. No matter how good or shitty a day it’s been, we all feel better and sleep easier being able to laugh at the fact that the emperor has no clothes, that the politicians and celebrities we see on TV or the big screen are just as flawed as the rest of us.
Moreover, and that’s a word I like to use because they told us in law school it sounds really impressive and you can bill clients more that way, what we see on late night gives us topics to talk about the next day. It used to be called “watercooler” conversation back in the old days. People would gather around the watercooler in the office and talk about what Johnny had said the night before. In the digital age, you get someone forwarding you a clip of what Stewart did the night before, or a text, “Did you see Morgan Freeman inhaling helium on Fallon?” You look at the clip and forward it along to ten other friends. So our back-and-forth conversation still centers on what the late-night hosts are talking about or showing, and the end result is no work ever gets done. It’s why the Chinese are outworking us and why for the first time their economy is number one. They don’t have late-night TV. If we want to surpass them, we should make sure Jimmy Fallon’s show is broadcast in Beijing. In fact, these clips and online conversations about late night are such important parts of our lives that sometimes we stop our shopping on Amazon at work, or playing Halo, or looking at porn. We text and e-mail and forward clips and use what the late-night shows talk about to frame our interactions. I call it the Jersey Shore/Real Housewives of New Jersey syndrome. Watching idiots is a way for us to say things may be bad but at least we’re not that. Or maybe we just like laughing at New Jersey.
What do late-night shows explain about us as Americans? How does the monologue change and shape our opinions? What do we laugh at? What can we laugh at in these overly sensitive, politically correct, it’s-just-a-joke-people times? Why do jokes that work when the character Stephen Colbert plays does them live cause problems when he tries them on Twitter: i.e., his “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.” In other words, why do jokes matter so much, and are they a thermometer taking a temperature of and just reflecting what’s out there or are they a thermostat changing “what is out there”?
Caveat one: I get the fact that jokes are not curing cancer. Then again, neither are any cancer doctors.
Caveat two: A confession. I entered politics because I wanted to change the world. After fifteen years I decided to become a comedy writer. Totally different from politics, because some comedy writers are honest and don’t sleep with interns.
Another difference: Comedy writers don’t try to change the world; we like it right where it is on any given day, a big fat sitting target. And although we don’t change the world, we do change the way people see the world and the people and events that are in the news. If you don’t believe me, ask Sarah Palin how she feels about Tina Fey.