Danielle Steel's Poetry, via Tina Fey

For today I thought I'd keep it simple and uncontroversial, but above all entertaining. I also wanted it tinged with nostalgia and ridiculousness. The research did not take long, but it was conclusive and the results are high-quality and thorough. Let's take a trip to the unrecoverable past, and weep.

This is what happened before Twitter. Now this kind of awesome transmission of hilarity is less constrained but even more inaccessible. It has grown from the constrained television/early-internet arena into a lawless continent. You might term it the twitterverse, or twitter galaxy. Late night TV isn't the most accessible thing, but goddamn if it didn't serve up some great times.

I remember the happy times on this very blog, when it seemed all I could do was watch late night TV and then post on this blog about it. I should've kept on with that business. I could've had an audience, but I choked. There aren't enough commentators and content-generators on the internet already, right? Any smart person could see how late-night TV commentary is an untapped market and how I could –

But I wasn't that smart person. The Jesse Navarro episode was a sign that Conan's show has the same kind of potential to be awesome. There is interest and potential discussion, refreshed each night, totally different each week, yet comfortingly similar and routine. There was so much to write about: Jimmy Fallon's meteoric but dubious rise (and amazing musical guests and the Roots!!!), Craig Ferguson's amazing cold opens, Conan's uninhibited but too-clever hilarity, and of course the underrated genius of Jimmy Kimmel.

If I could go back, this would've been a niche blog with a design document. Look around at the lack of progress, at the wreck of a blog.

(The book in question)

The Case of the Missing Pun/Caption

After weeks of lame-duck jokes about the new format of coffee that Starbucks is introducing, finally somebody has the guts to lampoon the issue entirely. But instead of the risky, high-octane satire we expect from Conan O'Brien, we get a bit where Andy Richter is paid to dunk himself (like a doughnut) into a vat of coffee. The operative word in the joke is impossible to conceptualize, would it be troughe? Troffe? Things are getting grim and dangerous in the TV business, evidently.

Anyhow, there's a great joke in that image, whether in the background or in the foreground, but it's doubtful whether anyone could actually make that joke and tell it properly, so the victory has to be handed to the crew who made it happen.

The real question, as usual, is where did they get that much coffee? The idea of huge, bad-coffee-filled tankers rolling around LA ready to meet the challenge of any coffee gimmick makes me uneasy.

Late Night Talkshows: Conan's Inevitable Comeback

Last night's (Wednesday, 12 January) episode of Conan was a reminder that no matter how bad the opening jokes are, Conan O'Brien will make the first ten minutes worth it. The monologue jokes were weak, so weak in fact that I suspect they were purposeful stinkers, but I still laughed a lot, because Conan can salvage failed jokes almost as well as he capitalizes on good jokes. The snow joke was outstandingly bad, which made it good for a laugh.

Andy Richter's reaction to the story about masturbation was priceless, and then he mocked the opening jokes as well. The final joke, about the 'Nintendo Wii Wii" was so awful that I think my theory is entirely correct. La Bamba's snowstorm was classic, though, "All trombone music has been suspended for the rest of the show". When James Lipton showed up and was denied work the show had redeemed itself. And nobody even made a height-related joke, which is a mark of maturity.

When Denis Leary brought up typewriters and Conan derailed him in the 20's style was awesome, if you go in for that kind of humor. It's late-night comedy at its finest when Conan O'Brien pretends to telegram a Twitter posting while Denis Leary wipes away a tear of laughter. Plus, Leary said his mother was on Facebook, but said so in a Twitteresque way, which means that at least one of my predictions has already come true, even earlier than I thought. So keep an eye on local bears. The show ended well, with Ice Cube (who is not on Late Night shows that often) and a comic (Tim Minchin) on a piano (which sounds trite but he made it work). But the opening was really surprisingly funny.

This brings me to 2010 Retrospective Pt. 4 (or 5): State of the Late-Night Talk Show in 2010
Jimmy Fallon had a great year, and his show is definitely getting better, but I think his best years are still ahead. Leno and Letterman are doing as well as ever, and Letterman even crashed into a Christmas tree on stage a few weeks ago, so you know those shows are doing fine. Ferguson's show is still excellent and irreverent. They've all been stable and working in much the same manner as ever.

So there is a fair bit of competition, but Conan O'Brien had the comeback. And I read TV critics saying Conan was "uncomfortable" and "awkward" and that his show wasn't funny. Those TV critics are the same who ignored Community, so they obviously live in a time before 2009 and don't qualify to make judgments on contemporary TV. Conan wins because his show had only a month in 2010 to prove itself, and it was damn funny in that time. It's a comeback, and that is the kind of story you can't invent and have to watch while it happens. And I want to know how it plays out, so I know if I was right in my completely unimportant internet judgment.

Conan Attacks the Youth, DC Comics

I had to laugh at the Thursday episode when I caught it on the web just now. Somebody points at Conan and he points back, then a whole row of audience members point back, and it begins a thing. Leno does the high-five thing and contributes the flu, everyone claps, but Conan O'Brien consistently involves the audience some types of chicanery. Not all types of chicanery, of course.

Then Conan actually, if you'll believe this, told a member to point at the stage for the entire show. I don't know if it's just me, but when Conan said "That's what's wrong with your generation." I laughed but moreover, was deeply offended. Nobody can hold up their arms that long... it's discouraging to see him promoting this kind of angst just about finger pointing.

The entire DC Comics segment was great. The criticism of various lame superheroes and Conan even made the artist laugh. Or payed him to laugh. Either way, the criticism part made laugh heartily, though it was as heartless as his assault on the youth during the opening. Sarah Silverman is the kind of guest who is bound to act funny and kind of steal the show, and Michio Kaku is the intellectual twist and obligatory science guest. Sounds like a good Thursday night to me, except, well, the e-show delay. It's still good a day later.

Obligatory science guests, in this case speaking about sacred quests. Bit of rhyming. Really a good guest though, you really don't hear enough about Unified Field theory these days.

EDIT: If you look right now (Sat, ~4 AM EST) on the film & animation section on YouTube you can see a large amount of trailers posted for the new Transformers movie, and to be honest the number is not what you'd expect after Transformers 2. This fan enthusiasm has to be synthetic as the robot monster it has become.

Feeling like a Real Blogger

So today I check out the blog and find out that the post about "The Jesse Episode" got me more hits in one day than in the entire history of my blog. Not only that, but the Jesse read the post. As you might guess, I don't even want to blog anymore after a highpoint like that. Now I know how real bloggers feel when their hits per day go from 100 to 1,000 over a post about a new local vegan microbrewery.

Just imagine that I searched for trending terms all over the internet and gave up. I'm going to lose the lead and goodwill I just gained, and agonizing about it just isn't worth it. I'll go back just this once to add something I missed last post: Apparently the musical guest on Jesse's episode, Cake, had to deal with an offhand audience who did not sing the parts assigned to them and flipped them all off. There's a bit of nuance in the way it's done, but the video is on Youtube, and you can see the flipping-off going on around 4:35 - 4:45.

So that's the last of that. What a night it must have been. And what a day, for me, when I find out that almost fifty people cared enough to search the internet for it and that I actually had a bunch of people visit my blog.   Probably they all know Jesse, since my usual Russian audience has disappeared entirely.

Late Night Talkshows: Conan O'Brien, the "Jesse" episode of Dec. 1

Of all the shows that air late at night or in the early morning, I have watched Conan's the longest. I didn't watch it in the 90's when it was god-awful (or so they say, and by 'they' I mean Fallon apologists) and I don't know if it ever was. The show was always a great change of pace from Letterman or Leno. The writing was hit-or-miss but Conan knew how to wring a laugh out of the most execrable joke his hack writers could throw at him.

His format isn't as inventive as Jimmy Fallon his replacement. Conan does all the things that other talk-shows do. His house band is not stupendous (though LaBamba has become legendary) and he does all the same things as other hosts. If anything, Ferguson is the only inventive host from the start, but he no longer competes with Conan for viewers, and I discussed him a bit in the post about Fallon.

There's still some originality about Conan O'Brien that people either love or hate. Most people I know either don't watch Conan because they don't care, or outright hate him. I don't know why people feel this way, since lots of funny things go on in his show. Like this Wednesday's episode (which I watched last night on the internet) where he took an audience member's hat, wore it, and made a long-running joke out of what happened afterward. Hat-sniffing, hair-fetishes: these are things you don't find on any other show, no matter how wacky it may be. The episode might as well be referred to as "The Jesse Episode", as even the later guests got into the action.

Joel McHale was one of the guests and he was merciless with poor Jesse, throwing out a series of insults about how he was dressed or who dressed him. It was a strange and disheartening scene to see an actor who plays everyone's favourite character berate a spectator for dressing casually. If a man doesn't want to dress well, it's not really anyone's business, and certainly not talk-show material. Community wasn't mentioned overmuch, but what was plugged was the Christmas episode which sounds outstanding even at the distance of a week. All in all, though, McHale's curmugeonliness was probably just an act by an otherwise great man who no doubt impersonates beggars in his spare time to help afford his suit habit.

The recurring bit about Dion parking in the studio was funny – another stunt you don't find on any other show. Ferguson has Secretariat and techno music and a fair bit of swearing, but he doesn't have Andy Richter as a parking valet. Speaking of Andy Richter, he still delivers solid laughs every night and I am glad to see him return. LaBamba is there too, so what I'm really waiting for is a new iteration of "In the Year 2000...", which NBC has probably copyrighted just to spite Conan.

That was just Monday, and the guests were good (I say this because I am in support of Community alumni making awkward scenes and half-heartedly plugging the show) even the fashion guy stood up for Jesse, making McHale the perfect villain. He stayed for the whole show, so he's obviously a gentleman into the bargain, and let's face it, he probably either apologized to Jesse or explained the nervous disorder that made him launch that triptych of personal insults.