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Caloroga Shark Media a big thank you to j Leno. Hi, I’m a Johnny Mac with your daily company news, John. Why are you thinking, jay Leno? Because right now in my world it’s Thursday, and I wanted to go to the beach on Friday and pre tape Monday, and I was like, eh, I don’t have enough stories for Monday.
And then I saw Jay Leno spoke to Deadline the headline death of Late Night.
Jay Leno on what went wrong at eleven thirty, why Joe Rogan is the new Johnny Carson and how John Oliver doesn’t know what he’s talking about. How about that? Thank you, jay Leto. I have not read this article at all, so I’m just going to dive in cold and see what Jay Leno, who some people say is the worst person who ever lived, has to say. The seventy six year old comic said, I mean, podcasts really are the new talk show.
Joe Rogan is the new Johnny Carson. Let’s do this piece by piece, Deadline. With all that’s going on in late night now, your exit in twenty fourteen looks like a prophetic move. Jaylen’ll laugh says that’s pretty funny. You know, I made my living as a stand up comic.
TV’s a job that you last thirteen weeks, will least. Okay, I was lucky. Mine lasted twenty two years. But the day the Tonight Show went in, I was back on the road the next night in Florida for five nights. And that’s what I do now.
So for me, nothing’s really changed. People always think as retirement, Well, I’m not retired. I do total dates a year, and I do think I do a good show. I got a few other things going on, like the Groad show that I enjoy. I have a good life.
After Late Night, Leno told the story of being dropped by his agent. It’s funny because I was so fortunate that my agent dropped me right before I got the Tonight Show in nineteen ninety two. I later worked it out. I saved thirty million dollars in commissions. I said, all right, fun with me, you know, I mean, I’m one of those people when anybody wants to break with me, I don’t plead.
I go, fine, okay, you’re cool. And that was the same thing, you know, with the agent. I remember the same thing happened when I was in the Tonight show and they’re going to replace me with Conan. And they called me and I said, you know, I did number one for like seventeen years. One of the executives says, we want what’s above number one?
And I go, O, hey, what’s above number one? I mean, I just started to laugh, and then I realized how stupid the statement was. I said, you want me out, I’m out. Fine, Then I was out. Deadline said it wasn’t pretty.
I remember you think Deadline Jay Leno said yeah. But then what happened was Craig Ferguson came along and he started beating Conan. Then I got a call from Jeff Zucker saying, I think I made a mistake. WHOA is that new information? I don’t recall, like off to check with the cool late night kids, I don’t remember hearing that before that.
Jeff Zucker said, I think I made a mistake because if I’m reading this right, he’s talking about Craig beating Conan. So that’s a twelve thirty war. So did Jeff say that at twelve thirty? Anyway? I got a call from Jeff Sucker saying, I think I made a mistake.
Jay Leno said, yeah, I told you. Zucker said, we’d like to have you back. Okay, fine, I’ll come back where if you want. You know, I don’t have a manager. I don’t have a full time agent.
I negotiate everything myself, all right, So that puts the timeline back to eleven thirty being mistake. Deadline goes Jay, Dude, well I bother at this point. Who needs the stress? Jay said, yeah, I know, it’s really stupid. Then again, I have a house in Beverly Hills, so it’s working out.
That’s pretty funny. The nice thing about doing your own negotiations you find out exactly if people feel. The client might say Leno sucks. I can’t stand that guy. If you have an agent doing your negotiations, what you hear is, oh he likes you.
He just doesn’t have anything for you right now. Yeah, sure, okay, Deadline says with Stephen Colbert gone, Jimmy Kimmel thriving but under threat, and everyone looking over their corporate shoulder for attacks from Donald Trump. Their own bosses are Greg Guttfeld. Why do you think Late Night lost its swagger? Leno said, it’s boring.
But here’s the thing I think her at late night the most, too many commercials. They passed some new rules before my tenure at the Tonight Show that after eleven thirty at night you could add like another five or six minutes to the hour. It came in waves. But by the end of my time at the Tonight Show, instead of doing like forty eight minutes a show was only like forty two when broken up. More So, when I turn on late night now, regardless of how I’m watching, if I say Jake from State Form again, I’m gonna shoot myself in the effing head.
Jay Jay, Language Jay. It’s like geez. The host comes out, does the monologue, then right away over to six minutes of commercials. She’d come back, the host talks about his coming up, and we’ll be right back and so on. It’s all cut up enough already.
Why watch that when I could switch over to streaming or YouTube and I can watch an hour with Arison Ford talking off the top of his head, as suppose having just a few minutes with the guest or with the host. You know, Johnny used to have real conversations. I tried to have real conversations. That seems to be gone, and the audience knows it. It’s not that people are better or worse.
It’s the fact that the whole medium has changed. The idea that you have to turn the TV on at eleven thirty PM to hear what’s being said, like appointment television. That sounds ridiculous now, So I don’t want to make it sound like a Leno went on a rant there deadline, said Devil’s Advocate. Why Leno then continued, because you can watch TV whenever you want. Now you can watch whatever show, whatever you want, you know, so that’s really rudined it.
There’s no immediacy. People used to say, Oh, let’s see what David Letterman whoever had to say about the president’s thing today. It’s interesting, he said, Let’s see what David Letterman had to say. That’s really what a really really interesting name to drop there, right, because most people sharing that notion would say, oh, let’s see what Carson has to say about the president. But Jay Leno specifically named checking David Letterman.
Huh oh, let’s see what David Letterman whoever had to say about the president’s thing today. And you and the whole world simultaneously at eleven thirty knew what they thought, now you can look it up anytime. You know, my brain froze there. I’m not going to make the end of my brain froze there because he said David Letterman. Then he said eleven thirty.
Arguably Jay Leto could be talking about somebody watching Late Night with David Letterman at eleven thirty Central. But I think most of us associate pre Leno David Letterman with twelve thirty. Very very interesting. Now you look it up anytime whenever you watch it. If you miss it, that’s okay, you know.
So what’s really changed? Skipping ahead, I mean, podcasts really are the new talk shows. Joe Rogan is the new Johnny Carson. Yeah, Joe talks to everybody about everything. There’s no scac to step in and say what you can and can’t say, so you really do get an unfiltered idea of what everybody thinks.
So yeah, I mean to me, that’s what’s also changed Late Night. I talk to young people. They don’t know CBS, NBCABC, Channel four. They just go to YouTube, which is amazing. If you had predicted YouTube would be the most popular channel in the world ten years ago, I think people would have said, what are you talking about, but it is now I teach college students.
He’s correct, they don’t think of TV brands the same way as oldies ten years ago. I don’t think the YouTube notion was crazy. Maybe we’ll change the time on there. But I get what Jay saying. Right, I’ve done about eight minutes on Jay Leno.
There’s more there. Let’s save a little more for tomorrow, right right right. You can read this on Deadline if you can’t wait for tomorrow. Bill Carter on the Late Night Er website had the headline Outside Tonight rebuilds Late Night for the YouTube crowd. This was a fluff piece of sorts about the new YouTube show Outside Tonight, hosted by Julian Shapiro bornham Well.
Bill Carter, I got news for you, buddy. When I looked Thursday at noon, Outside Tonight had six thousand views. I can get six thousand views, and that’s without YouTube promoting me. Six thousand. Yikes, that’s even less than who’s the other guy?
I forgot that guy’s name, Josh Gleb? Is that his name? Ben Gleeb, Ben Glebe. Ben Glebe had like twenty thousand views. Let’s say how Ben Gleib is doing Okay, Good Night with Ben Gleb.
The channel has two point nine to one million subscribers. That’s not too shabby, and something has changed, friends. I wow, I’m stunned by this number. I’m about to tell you so Episode three has at two twenty three pm on Thursday, five hundred and forty one thousand views. So this thing has caught on a little bit.
That’s a real number. It’s a much bigger number than six thousand, so the algorithm must have been kinder, right. We’ll have to keep an eye on that one. Josh Johnson had a big piece with Variety. They talked about how Josh puts out just about an hour every week every Tuesday on YouTube.
He’s racked up half a billion views. Josh told Variety, I don’t even think what I’m doing would be advisable necessarily. I see why people say you’re leaving a lot on the table or giving it away for free. But this is what I want to be doing, and it’s pushed me to get better. He talked about the New York Knicks.
There was one game when Jose Alvarado crashed into Mike Bloomberg. Josh said, we almost got rid of a billionaire out of nowhere. Everybody’s always planning, hiring security. Wh would have thought they would have gotten themselves killed. Variety got a little poetic here writing.
Johnson’s comedic style is highly expressive, and his voice, nasal with a southern inflection, leaps across octaves and volume levels. He’s a physical performer, one who could tell the same story four or five ways, peppering in new insights each time. His material ranges from political to trivial. A bit about the absurdity of the Iran war might be followed by one about revolving doors. Johnson, it seems, is highly approachable.
Maybe it’s because he’s in our living rooms talking directly to us as a daily show host. Or maybe it’s because when he greets you, his mouth curls into a boyish smile and his voice slides into a higher register, like Mickey Mouse if he grew up on the Bayou. That’s a description. Variety flexes a bit and says, it’s quarter eleven now, and we’ve uber to a over price susy joint, and so for late dinner. Fancy.
I asked him where that fifteen minutes of material he just did in the club, will go? Josh says, I don’t really know. Maybe I’ll hold on to it and do it again somewhere. Maybe I won’t. Fridy says most comics wouldn’t dream of bringing fifteen minutes of all new material to a club and leaving it there.
But Johnson is a stranger to the scarcity mindset. He says, I write one hundred and twenty five jokes a day, and that’s all to hopefully get three on air. You’ll learn to be precious and you learn that you have more in the tank than you think. He’s asked if he’ll wake up one day with nothing to say, Josh says, that would be like if you woke up and went to work and were worried you were going to run out of words. Out today on the eight hundred pound Gorilla, it’s Willie Max’s good Dad, bad Father.
Bert Kreischer was promoted by Flamingo Magazine, your home for comedy news and Flamingos. I guess, Bert said, I mean you want to talk about luck. My special Hey Big Boy, was released March seventeenth, twenty twenty two days into the pandemic. He says, everywhere in America, people were being forced to stay inside, so they had to find something to watch. I also believe you manifest your luck by recognizing acknowledging your luck.
Even at times when you find yourself unlucky, you need to try and find the luck in it. Bill Lawrence, the guy behind Scrubs and a bunch of other shows, Ted Lasso, Rooster, Shrinking Bad Monkey. He had a Variety profile I personally imaged in the Scrubs part. He was asked why he doesn’t shoot Scrubs in LA because he tries to do most of his production in LA. Variety asked what’s the obstacle Scrubs and said, straight money, We’re gonna try and get it back here for the third season.
Ooh wait, does that mean we’re getting a third season of Scrubs? Awesome new Scrubs. You know what I meant. It’s one of those equations that the money you’re given to make the show, and this is conjecture, equals like three and a half million in LA and five point six million in Vancouver. And that’s a show that’s already very inexpensive.
It’s a network TV show, and I couldn’t afford to make it here in La Roddy said, you’re not day to day on Scrubs. How much to worry about legacy? Bill said, we always argue about this in the writer’s room, and I’m the legacy smegacy guy. The ninth year of Scrubs was supposed to be a spinoff called mid School, and people argue, oh, you’re ruined the legacy. No, I didn’t you love the finale of season eight.
You don’t get to go back in time and not like it now because you’ve seen the other season that creatively was a spin off. I just don’t want to operate that way. I never want to feel like anything is a money grab. But the writers in the cast came back and I thought the idea that was kind of intriguing, so why not give it a shot. I’m never sweating the legacy aspect of it.
I didn’t hate season nine, and that is your comedy news for today. All Right, you shared the show. I’m sure you did, because otherwise I would bust out Amy Schumer singing, and none of us want that. So keep sharing the show because it’s still June. Your phone’s in your hand right now, hit the share button, send it to somebody.
Go, hey, check this out. Jay Leno said some stuff, and then they’ll be like, oh cool, I love the show, and then they’ll follow it, and then we don’t have to listen to Amy Schumer sing. You can follow a show on Spotify churn notifications on so you never miss an episode. The comments are also open there, and they are always open in the Facebook group Daily Comedy News Podcast group Ryan Hamilton Tomorrow. That means Dylan in the Facebook group.
He’s like sitting in front of the TV right now, waiting for midnight to strike so he can watch Ryan Hamilintson the second they put it live, and he’s going to be excited because I’m all in on Ryan Hamilton. That last spushal was fantastic, so you know, Ryan, don’t let me down, buddy, all right, See tomorrow, guys,