Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 22, 1993                   TAG: 9305220281
SECTION: SPECTATOR                    PAGE: S-12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LAWRENCE CHRISTON THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

EVERYONE SAYS JAY LENO'S DOING FINE: SO WHAT'S WRONG?

Leno looked at him appreciatively. He's nothing if not a polite host, so he couldn't very well have said: "Thanks, but who asked?"

It's been a year now since Leno took over hosting chores from the dearly departed Johnny Carson.

His ratings are solid - neck and neck with "Nightline," but still far ahead of everyone else in that time slot. He can still depend on a cheerful greeting from his studio audiences and, as a rule, the requisite tiers of laughter to roll down at the end of his punch lines.

Leno still gets first crack at the blue-chip guests; that is, the same dozen or so people making the late-night rounds in a given week to flog a new movie, an album or a TV appearance. And his cameo in the movie "Dave" signals that he's still watched by politicos who want a weather check outside the Beltway.

Everyone knew that it would be impossible to predict how long it would take for Leno to step beyond Carson's lengthy shadow, and if no one's calling him king of anything yet, all outward signs point to a dependably solid watch at the "Tonight Show" helm.

Why, then, is there this vague, indefinable sense of disquiet about him, this pull between wanting to see an obviously well-intended and conscientious fellow succeed in one of the toughest jobs in entertainment, and the dread of watching a smart figure metamorphose into a dutiful bore?

You see it pop up in odd places. In a recent Henry Martin cartoon in the New Yorker, for example, a somewhat tousle-haired guest dressed in a suit jacket and open-necked shirt sits at the show's fabled first-chair position and beams, "If this will help your ratings, Jay, I think your listeners would be interested to learn that while I was breaking into show business I constructed an A-bomb, which I dismantled after I got my first major part."

Thanks, pal. But who said anything about ratings?

Or, this overheard exchange between a veteran performer-turned-TV director and NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield:

Questioner: Why is Jay doing bad?

Littlefield: What're you saying? He's pulled in a younger demographic, his ratings are holding their own. We're very happy with Jay.

Questioner: Oh, so then it's true. He doing bad.

One of the most exquisite truisms that link politics and entertainment, which our director's occupational sensors caught, is that when everyone professes happiness about something, you can be certain that it's not working. For all its surrounding campfire glow, "The Tonight Show" right now is one log that won't quite roll.

The reasons are hard to pin down. As with yuppie flu, there are several low-grade symptoms, but nothing alarming enough to call for drastic remedy.

A lot of Leno loyalists concede that his interviewing skills are not especially adroit and that it's his monologue that kicks the show into gear - regardless of whether there's a powerhouse guest on hand to keep the audience squirming with anticipation.

The surprise here, or maybe not, considering the unmerciful voracity for fresh material those monologue minutes pose nightly, is that the material is rarely sharp. The things that brought Leno's comedy up to the major leagues - which include imagery, richness of language, a storyteller's feel for the perfect detail and an attitude freshened by communal moral pique - have been leached out of his routines as they've become more and more formulaic, tonally and structurally.

Now it's a chain-link rhythm of setup and punch, setup and punch, in which he pumps out a standard variety of subjects with a schoolboy's nasal snicker. Chances are, on any given night, you'll get your joke about Clinton (or Ted Kennedy) and Dole (or another Republican who said something nasty that day), a McDonald's reference and your list of stock villains, such as Geraldo or Jack Kevorkian. And your clunky political reference that zips straight past the audience into the Bermuda Triangle of lost jokes: "The new edition of Webster's Dictionary really reflects our evolving language. I looked up `tax cut' and it said, `See tax hike.' "

Of course, anything is fair game for any comedian, and most of the greats had their pets to fall back on while they took a fresh comedic breath. Hope had Zsa Zsa.

Carson had Bombastic Bushkin. The problem here is that the majority of Leno's routines now give off the staleness of the obligatory - there rarely is a sense of freshness; we can anticipate what the punch lines are before they're delivered.

And he's further muddied his delivery by couching his jokes in explanatory verbiage, so that they mutter off into irrelevance.

Although it's unfair to take a joke out of context, here's a symptomatic example: After the "tax hike" line, he talked through whatever potential there was for laughter by adding, "So it really does reflect what's goin' on." This Energizer background noise in which he keeps on talkin' has become habitual. At the moment, he's abandoned his writer's sense of economy, his trust of language's surrounding silence.

Interviews remain his weakness. It was good-hearted altruism that once prompted him to say, "I have the spotlight in my monologues. I let the guests have it when they come on." But it can lead to quiet catastrophe, as, for example, in the segment when Rutger Hauer did his actor's rude manipulative number on the ineffectually polite Leno, which temporarily turned things sour. Or the recent night when Marilu Henner went into hebephrenic teen meltdown at the sight of Sting and completely yanked the show out of Leno's control.

Any host would be hard-put to handle those situations (although you can see David Letterman peer into Henner's face and say, smilingly but with unmistakable authority, "Calm down"). The problem is in the more general run of the interviews.

Leno doesn't appear to have a deep curiosity about people, or a frame of reference outside of comedy, and it seems he's embarrassed to make anything out of a moment beyond small talk.

Of course, that's all many people are capable of, but there are still ways to get under the surface to find witty potential without exploiting them. After all, you would expect the show to be an entertainment, not just another assembly-line vehicle for some celebrity's dreary self-promotion. And what about when a controversial, high-octane guest does get on?

Is Ross Perot's hair really an item of interest when we, like the figures in Washington surely looking in, want to hear his latest on what ails America?

Maybe we're asking too much of Leno, and the show itself. Maybe he really has the demographic NBC wants him to have. Why, after all, should we ask more of a man than the modest limit he's publicly imposed on himself? It's only been a year, but it may also turn out to have been a symptomatic reign after all. If the '70s were the decade of ironic detachment and the '80s an age of excess, perhaps the '90s so far are shaping into a period of earnest mediocrity.

Jay Leno may just be the best we can do for ourselves right now.