Sep 23, 2009 01:25 PM
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Hollywood, 4:18 PM
Tue Feb 9
57 posts in the last 24 hours
And neither has his audience! Last night he featured two tired bits from '90s punchline Pee Wee Herman. What's next, dancing Itos? Even the new talent he's found is spectacularly unfunny. Oh, and he just discovered gentrification in Harlem!
The joke above about Pee Wee's abstinence ring was the only laugh of the whole hour. The Pee Wee revival is just like The Jay Leno Show, neither are especially bad in theory, but the execution has just been terrible. After this, Pee Wee told a bunch of stories from his childhood. We couldn't tell if these were real events that happened to actor Paul Reubens or fictional events that happened to the character Pee Wee Herman. We did ascertain that none of them were even vaguely entertaining. Then we had to grimace our way through a second segment where Jay continuously turned down Pee Wee's offers of vegetables because they weren't fattening. Just what fat American's need, another excuse to laugh at vegetables. Half way through, we closed our eyes and repeated our mantra of "Tell 'em Large Marge sent ya" until it was over.
What was even worse than Pee Wee, who at least has a reputation for comedy that is only slightly overshadowed by his reputation for public self-abuse, was the the show's new correspondent, Marina Franklin. Leno continues to try his hand at being like the Daily Show and managing to fail. This time he hits on the very new news of white people in Harlem! Franklin manages to get all the way through her entire field report without being funny even once. Even when she came out on stage for a pre-set grilling from Jay, she could barely even crack a joke. It's probably much funnier as a stand up act, but if this is her A game, we blanch at the thought of what she's going to do for her next dispatch. Maybe she can talk about hipsters in Williamsburg. No one knows that they're moving there! The whole segment is below.
Last night the show had 6.8 million viewers, slightly up from it's Monday tally. It was in ninth place last night, well above 10th place finisher 90210, which has slightly more than 2.2 million viewers. Leno was the lowest rated show on all the networks other than CW, with the winner of the evening, NCIS, clocking 20 million viewers. Yes, 20 million people watch NCIS. The mind boggles.
Send an email to Brian Moylan, the author of this post, at brian@gawker.com.
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