Things that Don't Suck: Doonesbury

The funny thing about newspaper comic strips—I mean “funny” not as in “ha ha, good joke” but as in “strange, unsettling, troubling”—is how bad they are. Unacceptably bad, really terrible, just shockingly awful, especially when you consider the thousands of people who are drawing pictures and writing jokes and thinking of stories at this very second—why do so many comic strips seem to be created by those who can do none of these things? Why do so many strips hit the trifecta of being poorly drawn, unfunny, and consisting of characters who are just cardboard cutouts delivering stale jokes that weren’t funny the first time you heard them? Why, oh why Lord, in a universe where only so much time is allotted to us to enjoy earthly pleasures, does Momma exist?

Here’s where I could start researching the history of the syndication system, where I could discuss the demographics of most newspaper comics readers (my guess is they are very old and prone to writing letters when their favorite strips are cancelled) and the general tendency of mass media to produce bland entertainment that enfolds our daily existence like a soggy beige envelope—but lets skip all that. Let’s talk about Doonesbury instead, which for me is the last of the great comic strips, something akin to a the last majestic dinosaur struggling through the ashen landscape surrounded by malnourished rodents picking at the bones of his contemporaries.

What non-comics fans don’t think about very often is there were really great comic strips in the past, a roster I’d say includes Peanuts, Krazy Kat, Pogo, a bunch of classic adventure strips like Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie, Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland (still trippy to look at after all these years), Gasoline Alley in its way—it was the first strip in which the characters aged, a rare feature that Doonesbury adopted—and more recently Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, and maybe The Far Side, but really the art for that last strip is pretty sub-par compared to the rest of the list. A few of those strips still survive today, but they are horrifying zombie carcasses of their former selves who should be shotgunned out of the pages of the papers they appear in (take a look at old Gasoline Alley strips—Fantagraphics has been putting out anthologies—and you’ll see how the strip has changed, mostly for the worse). There’s a lot of variety in all those strips I just mentioned, but all of their creators put blood and sweat, if not tears, into the work every day. Today so, so many strips are two or three panels with lazy linework, one bubble of dialogue per panel, and a flat punchline. They simply don’t try.


Doonesbury tries. It tries so hard that it has a whole set of problems that other comics don’t have. For instance, the strip’s cast of characters, originally a group of college students sharing a house way back in the early 70s, has expanded to the point where there are probably at least a hundred unique, named people that had recurring roles. It’s sort of intimidating to dive into a strip like that and try to figure out who everyone is—and what other strip can be intimidating to dive into? In addition, Doonesbury keeps up with current events in a way few other strips do, so if you only read the comics and sports pages, you likely won’t get some of the jokes, or care enough to follow the strip for long.

But wow, if you get into Doonesbury, there’s a lot to enjoy. There are elements of the serial-adventure strip in it (as I write these words, Jeff Redfern, son of strip regular Rick Redfern, is attempting to save a dictator from a bloodthirsty revolutionary mob in order to pay off a debt to a defense contractor), but every strip has a joke at the end, and pre-punchline dialogue that is pretty sharp. Sometimes, especially on Sundays, it turns into more of an editorial cartoon, which is why some papers have put Doonesbury permanently on the op-ed page. Most significantly in recent years, the strip has focused on veterans and active-duty military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by what I’ve heard doing a pretty good job representing and discussing pretty serious issues.

Then there’s the art, which has evolved from Gary Trudeau’s fairly dreadful chicken scratches in 1970 to a competent, workmanlike style in the 80s that repeated the same image across panels--the exterior of the White House, a character sitting in front of a television--far too often, to today’s strips, which are exceptionally clean, and stand out from other strips because it looks like someone took the time to storyboard them and to display the scene from different angles to create a sense of action—a simple thing, arguably, but something that no other comic on the page does.

The big flaw in Doonesbury is the political slant; it’s undeniably the work of a liberal who cares about politics, and sometimes, like in this February 13th Sunday strip, it really does become something like an editorial cartoon, or an extremely short op-ed column. I imagine that the more conservative you are, the less Doonesbury feels like art and the more it feels like windbaggy propaganda. (I’ve heard the same thing said about The Wire.) And like every strip ever made, there are off days, there are relatively boring storylines, there are places where it lags.

But seen as a continuous document, a narrative—like a soap opera or an exceptionally long novel—Doonesbury is an incredible achievement. It’s not just the story of a large and varied cast of characters, it’s the story of American politics over the last 40 years, seen through the perspective of journalists, activists, hippies, farmers, lobbyists, and soldiers. Doonesbury is the War and Peace of comic strips. It’s what journalism aspires to be, a rough draft of history. No other comic strip in newspaper history has linked itself so closely with current events. I’ve literally learned about the 80s by reading old Doonesbury collections, and you could do worse things for a clever child with an interest in politics than giving him some Doonesbury books. The strip really does merit preserving for future generations to look at, and I can’t think of any current comic about which the same could be said. Read more!

Things that don't Suck: The Larry Sanders Show

I wrote something over at Splitsider, a blog that takes comedy very seriously, about the Larry Sanders Show, an HBO sitcom from the 90s that laid the foundation for the next 20 years of 30-minute comedy shows. The show was one of the first not to have a live audience or laugh track and--well, just read thing if you want to find out, alright? I don't give a shit. Here's a clip of the show:
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Why Larry King Sucks

I wrote a letter to Larry King on this website. I hope he reads it! Or, I hope his assistant reads it to him. Read more!

Political News is Going to Suck for a While: Your 2012 Republican Primary Preview

In modern times, there’s no such thing as an “election year.” Elections never cease. Even now, after one election has barely ended, we’re already polling, punditing, and raging about the next election, which won’t actually happen for 22 months. This is good news if you like the kind of political reporting in which elections are treated like horse races, only these races last a lot longer and the horses die out one by one and collapse on the track until there is just one horse left standing on the pile of dead horses wheezing and bleeding and having had huge patches of skin ripped from its body in the course of the race, and this horse pledges to restore civility to Washington and get things done, dammit, while beneath the winning horse, the dead horses slowly start to come back to life, making statements via Twitter and pledging to tear the winning horse into pieces. For those of us who don’t enjoy this spectacle, the prospect of primaries “just around the corner” makes us shiver and break out into a cold sweat.

Thankfully, we don’t need to care about the 2012 presidential election. We don’t need to write long, speculative pieces in New York magazine about how Sarah Palin could become president, or talk about whether Michael Bloomberg will run as a third-party candidate, or parse the minutiae—and oh God, will there be minutiae—of the Republican primary. We don’t need to talk about this stuff even if we really follow the news and care about politics. Why not? Because unless something changes, like we hit another recession, or he gets caught in a hotel room with a dead woman or a live boy, Obama is going to win reelection, and might even do so fairly easily, which would render the primary season pretty much moot.

Moot how? Well, some potential candidates like Jeb Bush and Chris Christie are probably going to sit this cycle out, which they presumably wouldn’t if Obama were that vulnerable. The polls pretty much back this up—there was a funny one from a few months ago showing that people liked a generic Republican candidate better than Obama, but they liked Obama better than any actual Republican candidate. The frontrunners for the nomination (Palin, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich) are all pretty terrible as candidates.

To break it down one by one: Palin is popular with a certain kind of frothy-mouthed bloggy Republican who answers polling questions on Redstate, but she’s laughably unelectable in the country at large. Romney has the opposite problem: The base doesn’t like him any better than it did the last go-round, maybe because he’s a Mormon, maybe because he supported health care reform in Massachusetts. Newt—Jesus, do we need to consider him seriously now? If he came out of the primary, liberals would turn out to oppose him just as they would to oppose Sarah Palin.

Huckabee, well, Tom Jensen at left-leaning Public Policy Polling thinks that he’s the best GOP candidate. Huckabee has a fun name (although easily turned into “Fuckabee”), he’s an affable guy, he lost a bunch of weight and is committed to fighting obesity, he’s super Christian, he’s all about Zionism—pretty attractive to Republicans, all things considered. But when he ran for president four years ago, he got hosed everywhere except for Iowa and the South, and Chuck Norris isn’t going to help him when the aggressively ideological “values voters” and hard-line conservatives attack him. Already, Mike Pence (who?) polled better at something called the Values Voter Summit, and Ann Coulter called him a liberal for not wanting to kill and eat illegal immigrants. Can an election turn ugly before it even begins?

Just ignore any news coming out of this primary season, please. Even if I write something about it, don’t read it—find some articles about baseball instead, even if it’s only spring training. Or just watch YouTube footage of car accidents in slow motion or something. And if you live in New Hampshire or Iowa, I’d advise you to leave the state before the candidates descend on your state. This won’t be a media circus, it’ll be a months-long ten-way screaming match, with the winner inevitably covered in mud, blood, and allegations of homosexuality—and that candidate is probably going to go down in history as the next Bob Dole. Read more!

Who Chuck Lorre is and Why He Sucks

The latest issue of the New Yorker contains a profile of Chuck Lorre by Tom Bissell (gated), which answers a question I’ve never asked myself until now—namely, who is Chuck Lorre? Turns out he’s the human force of nature behind the most popular sitcoms of our time, Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, as well as not-exactly-classics like Grace Under Fire and Dharma and Greg. It’s a well-written article that has some nice behind-the-scenes details—did you know that all of those shows are actually filmed in front of a live audience?—but it also works amazingly hard at dancing around the fact that no matter how successful and hard-working Lorre is, he’s also a hack.

Ahem. Maybe the polite term for hack is “populist,” or “sitcom traditionalist,” or whatever phrase the New Yorker used to describe him. What Lorre has done throughout his career is create TV shows that are to television what Top 40 hits are to music and McDonald’s is to food. Two and a Half Men is a program for people who want to watch television but don’t care what they want. They want something comforting to rest their eyeballs on, something that won’t challenge them or force them to have an emotional or intellectual response. Fine, I guess. I’ve drunk too much cheap, shitty beer to question anyone’s taste. But the New Yorker, perhaps out of an instinct to not throw profile subjects under the bus, doesn’t quote any of the many, many people who hate Lorre’s lowbrow shows, and halfway defends his work with lines like:

Lorre’s standing among critics is not helped by his staunchly traditional approach to the sitcom. He is well aware of the shifts that have taken place in sitcom writing during the past twenty years, but he does not care all that much about them.

There’s little discussion about those “shifts” in sitcom writing, maybe because if the piece delved into recent sitcom history, Lorre’s attitude would come off as stodgy and willfully ignorant. The sitcoms of the 1980s, watched today, are astonishingly slow-paced and predictable, even the supposedly “good” ones like The Cosby Show. The reason for this is that the last 20 years have represented a revolution of sorts in sitcom writing, which resulted in shows from both sides of the Atlantic like Seinfeld, Newsradio, The Larry Sanders Show, The Simpsons, The Office, Spaced, The Office (again), Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, the first seasons of Malcolm in the Middle and 30 Rock, Peep Show, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and most recently, Louis, Parks and Recreation, and Community, which competes in the same time slot as The Big Bang Theory, the first of Lorre’s shows to be acknowledged as non-terrible by critics. For a sitcom writer to “not care all that much” about that list of shows is fucking insane, like a film director ignoring all films made after 1970, or a writer refusing to read anything published after 1900. And for Bissell not to find someone to put Lorre’s attitude in context is a bit of a problem for the piece.

Another thing Bissell might have done is to get a critic to point out that, okay, the four-camera sitcom is out of fashion among comedy geeks right now (mostly because all that audience laughter slows the pacing down to a crawl), but it’s not like critics are racist against traditionally structured shows or anything. Newsradio and Seinfeld were four-camera shows, and those are beloved shows whose fans will buy the DVD sets of. Louis CK’s Lucky Louie has less of a following, but there are still a bunch of folks who swear it was brilliant. Who’s clamoring to buy the DVDs of Dharma and Greg? Critics don’t like Lorre’s shows because critics love good sitcoms, have been watching good sitcoms for years, and Lorre’s shows aren’t good sitcoms.

Like most purveyors of critically-reviled pop culture, Lorre hates the critics who revile him. Bissell’s article quotes a message Lorre hid in his production company’s “vanity card” that flashes on the screen for a second after the credits roll:

You [critics] have absolutely no power to affect ratings and the likely success or failure of a TV show. In that arena you are laughably impotent. You are not unlike a flaccid penis flailing miserably at a welcoming vagina.

Beyond the somewhat bizarre sexual imagery (“flailing” at a “welcoming” vagina? Like the penis is being whipped against a woman’s wet pussy lips in some vaguely kinky impotence fetish fantasy?), this is a fairly revealing statement. Lorre defines “success” for his shows as “high ratings.” He wants as many eyeballs as he can to be glued to his shows, and that’s the extent of his ambition. Is it any wonder critics don’t like him?

See, Chuck, sitcom critics—those poor schmucks—did not get into the business to influence ratings. They don’t care much about ratings, by and large, unless low ratings cause a show they like to get cancelled. They became critics not to tear you, Chuck Lorre, down personally, but because they watched way too much TV as children and fell in love with the sitcom form. That’s a bad thing to love, because the sitcom form doesn’t always love them back, but they can’t help it. They want to write about the shows they love seriously and analytically, and they hope to spread the word about these shows to other people, who might also fall in love with these shows. They want, at bottom, for sitcoms to be taken seriously as art, or at least not dismissed by intellectuals as 22 minutes of content indifferently occupying space between ads for erection medication and cars.

That’s why people like Todd VanDerWerff praise shows like Community and why every comedy geek I know puts Arrested Development on a pedestal. Those are some great, densely-layered shows that reward you when you rewatch them and sometimes have some emotional depth to them. They inspire love and occasional debate among they’re fans, and they actually have fans, unlike your shows, which have viewers. People love all of the shows I listed above—how many people love Two and a Half Men?

Finally, the people who worked on Arrested Development don’t think the show “failed” because it got cancelled. They’re proud of having made one of the funniest shows of the past decade. And the people working on Community, which is getting beat in the ratings nightly by your Big Bang Theory, aren’t worried about “failure.” Donald Glover told me during an interview I did a while ago that it’s an awesome feeling to work alongside a talented ensemble on a really funny show that inspires really passionate fans. What I wonder, Chuck Lorre, is if the folks working for your show have that feeling.
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Why Louis C.K.'s Life on Television Sucks

I just finished watching the last two episodes of Louie C.K.’s show Louie on Hulu, and I’m no longer sure that the best show on television is on AMC. Louie isn’t the funniest thing I’ve had the privilege to watch on my laptop, but it might be the most ambitious comedy program since—what? I’m trying to think here. Since Freaks and Geeks, at least, and Louie is funnier than Freaks and Geeks.

(Some spoilers in the next paragraph, if you care about that stuff. Go watch the show now!)

Louie is a hard show to describe. It’s probably doomed to unpopularity, thanks to it’s odd format—rather than having the recurring characters and 22-minute story arcs of traditional sitcoms, each episode is composed of two or three vignettes, often unrelated to one another. Or not. Some episodes are one long story. Some episodes feature Louie C.K. as a kid for nearly the entire time. Some episodes feature long stretches of Louie’s stand up, which is usually hilarious. Ricky Gervais appears in a couple of episodes, as Louie’s asshole doctor (“I wouldn’t give your face to a burn victim,” he tells Louie as the comedian lies in a hospital). Various comedians appear as themselves, and one long scene of them playing poker and discussing the use of and origin of the word “faggot” veers from obscenity to honest emotion in the space of a minute. These tonal shifts are common in Louie. In one episode he gets bullied by a violence-obsessed 18-year-old, then follows the kid home, where he discovers that the kid’s father beats him. “Don’t do that,” Louie tells the dad, only to be chased out of the house by the mother—then, in an odd turn typical of the show, the dad comes out and shares a cigarette with Louie, and the two men talk about the difficulties of parenting. In another episode, a terrifying doctor convinces a child version of Louie that he is responsible for Jesus’ death. Louie’s brother breaks down in tears at a restaurant because his mother refuses to tell him she loves him. Louie imitates a monkey having an orgasm on a comedy club stage. Louie gets alarmingly stoned, decides to buy a dog, and the dog collapses and dies as soon as he brings it home. As the van carrying the dead dog in a garbage bag pulls away, Louie’s two adorable daughters pull up in a taxi with their mother for a weekend at their dad’s.

Louie is sometimes surreal, sometimes cruelly realistic, but always concerned with the big, big issues: love, loneliness, abandonment, religion, family, and most of all impending death and how to live with it. (The opening credits have Louie walking around while an unseen chorus sings, “You’re gonna die!”) I don’t know what to compare it to in terms of depth and ambition—maybe Annie Hall?—but it’s worth looking at the comparison between Louie and another show centered around the life of a standup comic, the infinitely more commercially successful Seinfeld.


Both shows portray ordinary mundane life in exact detail. Seinfeld centers around trifles and tiny bits of social interaction that spiral out of control into bizarre webs of lies and recrimination, while Louie concerns itself with Louie’s attempts to live his day-to-day life in a worthwhile manner before he inevitably dies. The contrast between the shows is apparent most of all in the title characters’ on-stage comedy routines. Jerry Seinfeld is seemingly pretty well-adjusted, except for his fixation on the insignificant little foibles of modern life. His offstage life is equally inconsequential—he floats along, dating a string of models he would never consider marrying, let alone procreating with, and trying to avoid embarrassment more than anything. If the character of Seinfeld ever thinks about the purpose of life, he hides it well.

Louie’s standup is different. He asks questions about morality, he worries over his daughters, he talks about God and the Bible, he notes the slow decay of his body in exacting detail. In his life on the show, Louie is trying to find something to care about, and mostly finds it in his daughters, in the passing along of genetic information, life, and knowledge. Seinfeld—his character on the show, at least, and also the character of Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm—never seems to care about anything, and is satisfied with that. You’re born, you grow up, you make enough money to eat out at a diner all the time, you argue with your friends about re-gifting and the placement of buttons on a shirt, you date gorgeous women, then you die, simply and without fanfare. Isn’t that a good enough summary of existence?

It isn’t for Louie, and that’s why his character is so miserable. Seinfeld was born without a soul and is fine with that, but Louie isn’t sure whether he has a soul, whether souls exist in the first place, and what you should do if you have a soul. More importantly, the answers to those questions matter to Louie, as they do to a lot of people—which is why we’ll never be as happy-go-lucky as the people on Seinfeld, or any traditional sitcom.

Intelligent people with even an ounce of self-awareness ask themselves at one time or another, “What is the purpose of my life?” On Seinfeld, a “show about nothing” the answer is: “There is no purpose, duh.” On Friends, to bring another sitcom into the mix, the answer is, “Find your soulmate in the most complicated manner possible, at which point you will be happy forever.” (This is also the message of every romantic comedy ever churned out.)

Louie, like nearly every work of art worth discussing, offers no answer, except maybe “Keep looking, there must be a purpose, because otherwise life would be awful and unbearable.” One feature of the show that slips by almost unnoticed is that religion—specifically Christianity—appears more often, and is taken more seriously, than any mainstream show since Andy Griffith. Louie is a character with not only an interior life, but a spiritual one as well. That’s not a common thing these days, and it’s nice to know that a show like Louie can exist on television.

I worry that I’ve made the show sound more serious than it actually is. Here’s the poker scene I mentioned above:
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Why Newspaper Comic Strips Suck

I grew up in a house with a newspaper subscription, and every morning before the school bus came I'd get the plastic-wrapped Seattle PI (which is no longer in print) from the front porch and peruse it over my bowl of milk-softened cereal. I never paid much attention to the front page—except maybe on 9/12—and the sports section only got my attention during baseball season and on the Mondays after Seahawks games. The only part of the paper I read with any sort of regularity was the comics page.

Maybe you know what I mean by “comics page.” It's usually in the “Life and Arts” section with the horoscopes and the advice columns—20 or 30 horizontal strips (like the strips at the top of this post, which are all from today's paper) and as many one-panel strips as are required to fill the rest of the space, like this Family Circus:


Some people glance at the comics page every morning and forget about it, but I was drawn to the format in a way that seems extremely strange to me now. I bought collections of strips, I read my dad's old collections of Peanuts and Bloom County and Doonesbury (the latter two I didn't understand because I didn't know who Ronald Reagan and Oliver North were), and I followed my favorite strips like hipsters follow obscure bands—I was angry when the PI didn't carry the excellent Get Fuzzy, and I despaired at the drop in quality of The Boondocks as time went on. We all have subjects we're privately passionate about. For Eric Massa, it's the supple buttocks of his male staffers; for me it was comic strips.

The problem was, I didn't enjoy 95 percent of the comic strips I read. The strips mentioned in the previous paragraph I can read and enjoy to this day, but those are some of the best strips of the last three decades, by which I mean they were funny about a third or a half of the time and the rest of the time the artwork could make up for it. The majority of the time, newspaper comic are like the examples you can see on this page—unfunny or poorly drawn, usually both at once.

Look at Beetle Bailey or Wizard of Id. Really look at them, don't skim over them the way most people do and the way I did when I was 13. Generic jokes, the kind you can get out of a really cheesy joke book, and characters so indifferently drawn your eye just glides past them. Of course, the characters don't really matter, since they exist solely to spout the prepackaged setups and punchlines—does it matter that the wizard is a wizard? Or that Beetle Bailey takes place in the military? (Also, couldn't the wizard just heal himself with magic? And what “work” is he going to?) These strips, by any objective standard, are really, really fucking awful, unfunny things that shouldn't be reproduced anywhere, yet alone in hundreds of newspapers.

These are all “legacy strips,” franchises that had their heyday dozens of years ago and are now drawn by their creators' sons or inheritors. Sometimes they are produced by a team of writers, hard as that is to believe, and they often have surprisingly vast commercial empires—how many stuffed, suction-pawed Garfields have you seen in car windows? They are in the newspaper because they have “name recognition” and because if a newspaper tries to replace a comedic and artistic void like Hi and Lois with something preferable—like escort advertisements—a bunch of people write in to complain about the change. This brings us to the core audience for newspaper comics, who are:

1.People who read them ironically and comment on the Comics Curmudgeon.
2.Old people who read them because they've done so for years and don't care about the artistic or comedic value of comics at all.

The second category is much bigger than the first, which is why newspaper comics are so toothless these days that that adjective doesn't do them justice. They have negative teeth. They are so bad that when The Boondocks appeared, a fairly well-drawn, funny strip with definable characters and a perspective on the outside world, it counted as a revelation for me. You can actually do something with those three panels in black and white! There can be more to this art form than recycled jokes delivered from lazily sketched (in more than one sense) characters standing in undefined backgrounds!

Yeah, that's right, comic strips are an art form. Go back and read some Calvin and Hobbes or Krazy Kat if you don't think that comic strips can be art. Harvey Pekar, the creator of American Splendor—which never appeared in a newspaper—said that comics were “words and pictures; you can do anything with words and pictures!” But in the bleak reality of newspaper strips, no one bothers to do anything interesting with words and pictures. Maybe that's due to the strict deadlines, maybe the good artists are giving up on strips or moving to the web; whatever the reason, newspaper comics—still the most well-known branch of non-superhero comics—serve even less purpose than newspapers themselves. They aren't dead yet, but maybe they should be.

The horrible thing isn't that these strips are terrible. God knows there is plenty of terrible in the world today. The problem is that a kid like me, who reads the comics for some reason, will grow up and think that that is what comics are supposed to be. The form has an incredible amount of potential, and I'm lucky enough to have found some good words with pictures to read. But the way the average America—who still reads the newspaper in this day and age—experiences comics is through the comics page. That's like experiencing gun collecting by being shot. It would be nice if more people could experience comics the way that they can be experienced, but that will never happen as long as Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois dominate newspapers.


Further reading: check out David Malki's hilarious and informative “The Comic Strip Doctor,” especially this entry on Momma, maybe the worst strip ever printed. Read more!

Why The Tonight Show Sucks

The entertainment media has been in a flurry lately, as you know if you're one of those people who follows celebrity news as a substitute for authentic human contact: The Tonight Show is getting a new host again, or more accurately it's getting an old host again, or even more accurately, Jay Leno is returning to his old host because Jay Leno is a parasite.

Supposedly, the conflict between Leno and Conan is a battle as timeless and important as the battle between Mordor and Minas Tirith. On one hand you have a big-chinned doofus custom made for Middle America, who tells jokes everyone can understand and enjoys the simpler pleasures in life, like having hundreds of breathtakingly expensive cars. On the other hand, you have this weird, tall, red-headed dork, who has a strange, jerky energy to him and does “edgy” things, like having a bear masturbate on his show. If you are a mouth-breathing tea-partier who buys tacky Jesus paintings, you like Leno. If you are a smarter-than-thou, pot-smoking, humanities-degree-holding 20-something who knows who Amy Poehler is and cares about the decline of The Simpsons, you like Conan, but you probably didn't watch his show all that much, which is why he got canned.

Which brings up the central problem with the media brouhaha over The Tonight Show—like baseball, we're supposed to care about network talk shows because of its history (blah blah Johnny Carson David Letterman blah blah), but also like baseball, if you sit down and actually watch it you'll discover that it's pretty fucking dull unless you're on mushrooms.

Here's how talk shows go: the host comes out (applause) and stands in front of a curtain and tells jokes about current events and weird news stories, some of which are funny. Then he goes down and sits at his desk while a band plays some generic riffs (why is he sitting down? Is he tired? Why couldn't he tell jokes at his desk?). Then he performs a “desk piece,” where he pulls out some semi-humorous props and displays like a more dignified Carrot Top, or they do a “remote,” a pre-taped segment where the host or someone else goes to a farm or a donut factory or a boxing gym and learns how to ride a horse or kickbox while cracking wise.

Then the whole purpose of the show: celebrity interviews! Sometimes, the celebrity will be a comedian, in which case he'll run through his material while the host nods, laughs, and goes, “That's hilarious!” once in a while. If the celebrity isn't a comedian, he'll tell a personal anecdote or talk about working with (insert name here). If the guest is a woman, there might be some mild flirting. All of this, of course, is in the name of promoting the movie/book/comedy album that the guest is putting out. Occasionally, things get weird, but this doesn't happen often enough to be a reason to tune in. At the end, sometimes there's a musical guest who plays a song, usually a middle-of-the-road rock or pop number that sort of reminds everyone who's still awake of Counting Crows.

It's not a bad format, and it's probably a fine way to promote movies that are bankrolled by the same companies that own the talk shows. But from a 21st century viewer's perspective, it leaves a lot to be desired. When Carson was doing it, there weren't many options—if you were watching TV at 11:30 pm, you were pretty much watching Tonight. Now you can watch whatever you want whenever you want, thanks to the internet and Netflix, so it's not a surprise that Conan's ratings weren't very good. What's surprising is that millions of people are still watching Conan and Leno run through the same thirty-year-old format night after night after night.

If you're one of those people who really likes Conan and was sorry to see him treated so badly by NBC (although they might be giving him 40 million dollars for his trouble, so maybe “badly” isn't the word), be honest: do you give a shit about The Tonight Show, beyond wishing bad things would happen to Leno? There are many, many comedy shows more interesting than Tonight out there, and just because we're supposed to care about late night talk shows doesn't mean we should. Read more!