OK, this time there's no griping and sniping. Tonight -- on its ninth try -- "The Jay Leno Show" finally got it right.
Admittedly, I missed a small section in the middle -- Rush Limbaugh on the race track and then the start of the Smokey Robinson, Joss Stone duet. (They are great talents, but didn't it seem a tad creepy the way Smokey, 69, kept leaning into Joss, 22?) What I saw, however, was terrific.
My complaint until now had been excessive reliance on "found humor" -- going out with a camera and microphone and hoping something funny happens. That sometimes works, but it's no match for well-conceived, well-written material.
Tonight included no found humor and many big laughs.
Leno's monolog, which seemed too short Wednesday, was a solid 10 minutes tonight. It ranged from the news that Marilyn Manson has swine flu ("how can you tell if he turned pale and sickly?") to the Los Angeles limit on the number of roosters in a house. "That's what I love about it here," Leno said. "You can have 50,000 illegal immigrants in your house, but only one rooster."
The "correspondent" section -- usually producing so-so found humor -- instead had a great piece by comic Nick Thune. Strumming his guitar, he gave a lecture on the only important thing about high school -- making sure you come off well years from now, when you look back at your high school annual. It was brilliantly done.
The interview portion also went well. Leno was quick to keep Limbaugh on-subject and to offer counterbalance.
And the closing bit was a gem, offering failures you see on the Internet. Sure, it's always funny to see a guy (taping a commercial) jump off a building and onto mattresses that are atop a car ... then go too far and crash onto the ground. Others have shown such Internet bits, but Leno had a great collection of them, assembled and presented beautifully. It was a funny ending to his first really good primetime show.
The driving segment was funny too. Limbaugh was told about the penalities for hitting the cutouts of Al Gore and Ed Begley -- and made a deliberate point of hitting them anyway, even backing up to give Gore a second strike. Limbaugh scoffed at Leno's point that the Ford car was saving the enviroment, but after his race, he seemed genuinely impressed with the car on its own merits.
And yes, the interview was particularly good. Too often, talk hosts (even good ones like Jon Stewart) treat their conservative guests adversarially. Leno was as willing to let Limbaugh make his points as he was last week to let Michael Moore make his. The biggest surprise was that the Leno audience seemed to greet many of Limbaugh's points enthusiastically. If there was booing, there wasn't a lot of it.