Lane: Hillary Clinton kicks off The Late Show with a taped intro. "Dave's been off the air for eight long weeks because of the writers strike. Tonight he's back. Oh well … all good things must come to an end."
Lane: Even WGA members can't make Hillary Clinton funny.
Dan: I wonder if her speechwriters are union?
Dan: The Tonight Show started off with Jay joking, "A Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian walk into a bar … but we don't know what happened, because we have no writers!"
Dan: ...And then, a rim shot.
Dan: Now he's launched into … an actual monologue, with multiple hoary but obviously written jokes.
Dan: "It's fun writing this stuff yourself! I'm doing what I did when I started. I think of jokes in the middle of the night, and I ask my wife, 'Honey, is this funny?'"
Dan: But I thought Jay was a WGA member … is he admitting to scabbing?
Lane: Well, oddly enough, I'm a few minutes into Letterman's monologue and so far every joke sounds like something he came up with on his walk to the stage.
Lane: Biff Henderson just came out and asked him when the writers are coming back.
Dan: Meanwhile, the first monologue of Jay Leno's struck show was a fully written, ten-minute-long business-as-usual piece with rim-shotted jokes. The only difference between this monologue and a non-strike monologue was that most of the hacky jokes were about the writers' strike.
Dan: "There are more people picketing NBC than watching NBC!"
Lane: He can't possibly be writing that himself. I was under the distinct impression that Jay Leno was even less funny than that.
Dan: He says he is!
Lane: There's no way!
Dan: "We're just following what the Guild says — we can write for ourselves, we just can't do what CBS is doing." But that, as far as I know, is patently untrue.
Lane: The Guild has said no such thing.
Dan: Jay Leno is way scabbier than we thought!
Dan: But also slightly funnier.
Dan: The AP reports that the WGA wouldn't comment on whether Jay is violating his membership rules.
Dan: Which means, "Yes he is."
Dan: FILLER ALERT! Post-monologue, Leno has — some Web video!
Dan: From JibJab.com
Lane: Ouch — outsourcing to Jib Jab is pretty lame.
Dan: Ooh Cloverfield ad!
Lane: Thus far, Letterman seems to be just ad-libbing. He just told a joke about the heart surgery he had in 2000, which, as I recall, wasn't even funny then.
Dan: It makes me wonder how much of his usual conversation with the audience is actually ad-libbed in a typical show.
Dan: Apparently, writers only write Top Tens and sketches.
Lane: That would certainly seem to be the case tonight.
Dan: So maybe Dave always just says whatever the hell he wants in this part of the show.
Lane: Here's the proof. Letterman says the reason for the strike is because writers are … sick of paying for their own pencils.
Dan: WOW.
Lane: Even the crap on LateShowWritersOnStrike.com was slightly funnier than that.
Dan: Meanwhile, FILLER ALERT! Jay started answering questions from audience members, then asked Kevin Eubanks how his Christmas was. "It was good," Eubanks said, and then there was an awkward silence. So it is apparent that even Leno's banter with Eubanks is usually scripted.
Dan: A guest just asked him if he missed having a New Year's show, and he said, "No, that's always the worst show of the year! Everyone's booked and all you can get is plate spinners!" Leno's eerily prescient about the future of his own show.
Dan: Also, I sort of think that being unscripted makes Jay a little less affable and a little meaner.
Dan: And funnier.
Lane: Letterman is also answering audience questions about the writers' strike in what seems to be the first actual scripted segment of the night.
Lane: Did Letterman's writers also write tonight's Tonight Show?
Dan: Maybe they got paid double their .0001 percent Internet residual rate!
Lane: The questions are clearly prescreened. Some guy asked if CBS used violence to intimidate anyone on the show, Dave said no, then a guy came out and punched Alan Kalter.
Lane: God, these jokes are bad.
Dan: But are they worse than usual?
Dan: Have we all been remembering Letterman incorrectly? Does it turn out he's actually just not that funny?
Dan: Crankier than Leno, but not actually better than him?
Lane: I think Letterman's usually funniest when his scripted bits are tanking and he's apologizing for them. So his writers must've pitched him some extra-crappy material today in the hopes of bringing that out. But I think he may be out of practice.
Dan: Commercial on Leno — I just switched over. That second-grade teacher who's asking Dave a question is pretty hot though.
Lane: That second-grade teacher IS hot. Letterman always picks hot girls for audience participation bits … That's another funny part of the Late Show that writers probably have nothing to do with!
Lane: Dave started up a gag about how the writers kept warm during the strike (something about electric underpants), but his head writer, Bill Sheft, stopped him and said he was denying everyone the conclusion of the joke to remind us about the ongoing strike
Lane: What good are writers if they can only write jokes about the writers' strike?
Dan: Good question.
Dan: As you have learned in the last few painful weeks, there is an extremely finite number of funny jokes one can make about the writers' strike.
Lane: At least Leno can go Jaywalking or talk about Kevin Eubanks's Christmas. Ten more writers' strike jokes and I'd KILL to hear about Kevin Eubanks's Christmas.
Dan: MIKE HUCKABEE JUST MADE THE FUNNIEST JOKE OF THE NIGHT
Lane: WHA?
Dan: Well, he made the joke seven years ago in an interview on the Tonight Show they replayed just now. He was governor of Arkansas at the time and lived in a trailer, which he described as "a triple wide, so Jay, there's enough room for you and your chin."
Lane: Wow!
Lane: Letterman's doing the Top Ten Demands of Striking Writers, As Read By Striking Writers.
Lane: "Complimentary tote bag with next insulting contract offer."
Dan: If there is one thing we learned from our Letterman writer post today, it's that at all costs the Top Ten list better fucking well be funny.
Lane: "No rollbacks in health benefits so I can cheat the hypothermia I caught in the picket line."
Lane: This list is just angry and bitter.
Dan: Commercial! I'm switching over for Top Ten.
Dan: Yeah, nary a laugh to be found.
Dan: Hey, it's Warren Leight, Tony winner turned Law & Order: Criminal Intent writer!
Dan: And Gina Gionfriddo, hot young playwright turned Law & Order writer!
Dan: The writers are worse off than I thought; I didn't realize they were all starving playwrights.
Dan: Wow, that was kind of a star-studded group, if you are a nerd.
Lane: What's going on on Leno?
Dan: Back from commercial — Huckabee is playing guitar with Kevin Eubanks.
Dan: EXTENDED JAM SESSION!!!!
Dan: High-five for Eubanks! Republicans really DO care about black people!
Dan: blah blah boring health-care crisis
Dan: blah blah boring Mitt Romney
Lane: That's certainly preferable to what's happening on Letterman at this very second. Robin Williams is on doing circumcision jokes and bragging about having picketed with the writers.
Lane: All of Robin Williams's jokes must have been pre-written. Is he a WGA member?
Dan: ROBIN WILLIAMS IS AN IMPROVISATIONAL GENIUS WHO DOES NOT WRITE HIS OWN JOKES. THEY SPRING FULLY FORMED INTO HIS MIND SENT BY THE GODS OF COMEDY.
Dan: Now it's Emeril time!!!
Lane: What's he making tonight?
Dan: A big fucking pot of BAM!!!!
Dan: Oh wait! He's explaining BAM!
Dan: He says he developed it to wake up his stagehands when they used to shoot eight shows a day, which is actually kind of funny.
Lane: EMERIL LAGASSE IS AN IMPROVISATIONAL GENIUS WHO DOES NOT WRITE HIS OWN JOKES. THEY SPRING FULLY FORMED INTO HIS MIND SENT BY THE GODS OF COMEDY.
Dan: Leno just burned his hand: an actual unscripted moment!
Lane: Does it look serious?
Dan: Not serious enough.
Lane: Ooh, Cloverfield commercial
Dan: As Manhattan burns on your TV, so does Leno's steak brandy flambé burn on mine.
Dan: Now Chingy is rapping. You know more about the hippity-hop music than I do. Would you have expected Chingy to be a scab?
Lane: I never would've thought the man who penned such lyrics as "Gimme what you got for a pork chop … uh" would insult his fellow writers like this, but I guess I stand corrected.
Dan: He certainly supports the Drummers Guild of America. He's playing with two live percussionists … one at a drum kit and one standing like Sheila E.
Lane: Lupe Fiasco's just finishing up on Letterman.
Dan: Lupe Fiasco, friend to the working man, you mean.
Lane: Letterman did a bit about what the show would look like had the writers not been permitted to return to work. Apparently there would have been sexy dancing ladies.
Lane: But luckily he cut a deal with the WGA so he could come back from commercial and interview his associate producer for five minutes instead.
Dan: We can all be grateful for that.
Dan: It is interesting that Letterman, for whom things are business as usual, treated tonight as a special occasion, while Leno, for whom everything is all different, attempted to do his show as if nothing had changed.
Lane: He'll presumably be pounded by the WGA as a result.
Dan: But what we really learned tonight is whether their material is written or unwritten or scab-written, Dave and Jay are really, really out of practice.