Free Republic

“HERE’S A fascinating story,” the longtime host of NBC’s Tonight Show With Jay Leno told his audience last week, mentioning a recent Iowa Supreme Court ruling “that a dentist could legally fire his female assistant because he found her too sexy, too attractive, and a threat to his marriage. She didn’t do anything. She’s just good-looking.” The payoff: “Hey, I’ll bet that’s what happened to me here at NBC!” It’s the sort of joke that is rapidly becoming a staple of Leno’s monologue. (On Monday’s show, riffing on the royal baby, he confided that he was “a little bummed out,...

White House Correspondents' Dinner 2013

Imagine that Fox News had run a spoof video of someone seeming to line up a leading Democrat for a high-powered rifle shot. Need we state the obvious? MSNBC and the rest of the MSM would have interrupted all normal broadcasting for at least the rest of the day to condemn the outrage. But if a liberal late-night TV show runs a clip of Sarah Palin seeming to take such a shot at Dick Cheney? Well, that's all in good fun. Conan O'Brien last night ran a spoof video of Palin, reacting to Cheney's recent comment that McCain's pick of...

Two questions about the Anderson Copper beating: 1. Is it safe to send our media into such a hostile situation? 2. How do we get Glenn Beck over there?

I was in the next room while my girlfriend was watching Conan deliver his TV monologue Wednesday night. It was during this when I heard the comic announce that Disney was to build one of its theme parks in Israel. I paused for the punch-line as it hung in mid-air. When it came, it sounded something like “one of [the Israeli Disney park’s] attractions will be a boat ride called ‘Hit a Small Yet Occupied Territory.” That didn’t sound quite right – so I figured that whether the joke was righteous or wrong, spoken in rectitude or dhimmitude, I must’ve...

Conan O'Brien unveiled a never-before-seen version of 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' featuring Sarah Palin on Wednesday night's "Conan." (Video at source link).

...The program will air Mondays through Thursdays at 11 p.m. Eastern... O'Brien quickly fired out a celebratory tweet. "The good news: I will be doing a show on TBS starting in November! The bad news: I'll be playing Rudy on the all new Cosby Show," he posted Monday on Twitter. The surprise announcement hit the same day O'Brien starts a two-month, nationwide comedy tour in Eugene, Ore., amid persistent reports that he was likely to claim Fox as his new late-night home... "In three months, I've gone from network television to Twitter to performing live in theaters, and now I'm...

Cultural historians are desperately seeking a precedent to the Jay Leno-Conan O'Brien fiasco. They are looking in the wrong places. True, Pat Sajak, Chevy Chase and Joan Rivers all got axed from late-night talk shows after shockingly brief stints at the helm, but none of them got $32.5 million to take a hike. And none of them got replaced by the person they had replaced. And none of them pouted about getting canned for general incompetence while millions of their countrymen—who had not actually failed at their jobs—were unable to find work. No, the most appropriate parallel to the debacle...

BREAKING NEWS! EXCLUSIVE! 9TH UPDATE, FRIDAY 7 AM: I can confirm that Team Conan reassembled in Los Angeles last night, and O'Brien's reps are still "figuring out how to settle" but at the same time still lobbying NBCU chief Jeff Zucker to keep Conan as host of The Tonight Show. Their negotiations continued with NBC. Unlike the network which wants a resolution by end of today, the agents-lawyers-managers are in no hurry to accept what NBC is offering to end this late night crisis and the resulting PR nightmare. Team Conan is banking on it getting worse, not better, with...

Ouch. Joe Scarborough on today's Morning Joe: JOE SCARBOROUGH: You understand what I'm saying. I prefer Conan to Leno. I prefer my dog to Leno. That's just me: well, my dog's very funny. The irony is that despite his personal preference for canine comedy, Joe was making the point that from a business perspective, it makes sense to replace O'Brien with Leno. View video here.

Pretty Funny! I am with Team COCO!

<p>TV funnyman Jay Leno is "furious" with how NBC has treated him and Conan O'Brien and is reportedly considering walking away from the network. A day after O'Brien threatened to walk away from NBC, Leno is considering doing the same.</p>

The Jay Leno Show currently seen nightly on NBC at 9:00 (CST) has sunk to such a lowly place in the ratings that local NBC affiliates all over the nation have requested that the NBC Television Network cancel the show....

St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Rosalynde Welch says the Conan O'Brien was both right and wrong about Mormons during the recent Mormon Song segment: "The joke is not at the Mormons' expense, really; it's making fun of the notion that 'Big Love,' 'Witness' and 'Children of the Corn' are sources of information about Mormonism... SNIP BYU's Daily Universe got the "Typo of the Year" award by Craig Silverman, writer for Huffington Post and whose blog chronicles the mistakes of the news industry. Silverman writes: "'The Daily Universe, a student paper at BYU, recalled and trashed 18,000 copies of an edition after...

Sarah Palin's appearance on the Conan O'Brien late night show generated huge positive buzz. Even (some of) the Palin haters were hard-pressed to come up with a negative about it. This marks something of a turning point for Palin. More so than daytime media, late night shows seem to have the power to define a public persona. Usually, late night references to Palin are of the demeaning variety, most notably David Letterman's near continuous anti-Palin jihad and the Saturday Night Live Tina Fay skits mocking Palin. When Palin appeared on SNL during the campaign, the appearance was damage control, at...

Politician Sarah Palin showed she is game for a laugh when she got her own back on William Shatner for making fun of her book.

BC says Conan O'Brien hit his head during a stunt and Friday night's production halted... Developing...

William Shatner became one of the all-time nightmare guests on an American TV show after making a series of rude hand gestures at the host. Red-faced and visibly sweating the 78-year-old Star Trek actor appeared out of sorts on the long-running Tonight Show. He appeared on the programme, hosted by Conan O'Brien, to promote his biography and up-coming TV series. William Shatner Out of order: William Shatner flicked his middle finger at host Conan O'Brien during an interview on the Tonight Show in the U.S. But his behaviour got so bad at one point new host Conan O'Brien walked off...

Which is worse? Network execs too scared to change a successful formula. Or network execs too willing to turn everything on its head. It's clear that Conan's version of NBC's cash cow The Tonight Show is just more of the same old/same old. And that's how O'Brien's longtime exec producer Jeff Ross and boss Jeff Zucker want it. But while they were golfing together this weekend in a foursome at Riviera Country Club (Ross, who just moved out here, is the better player, while Zucker has a 14 handicap and can barely keep up), they both worried how to prevent...

On Tuesday night I watched the Tonight Show starring Conan Obrien. The preliminary amusement featured NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams in an exclusive interview with President Obama. I wondered whether they were going to show some Presidential gaffe or candid moment. Perish the thought. Five or six million fellow Americans and I got to see our President fumble his way through a few rather unfunny lines, and provide an official endorsement for NBC’s new Tonight Show host. It barely rose to the tepid mark on the humor meter, but what a coup, nonetheless. How wonderful that the leader of...