Years ago, when I last saw Jay Leno on the Tonight Show more than once every couple of years, I identified what I believed to be the fundamental element of Leno’s monologue technique – the Comedic Fact.
So, let’s say some celebrity’s comedic fact was that they were fat. As you may recall, Oprah previously found herself in this predicament amidst her much publicized weight loss and gain, so let’s use her as an example. (I suspect her comedic fact is now that she’s super rich.)
Leno might start with a “news of the weird” type story that slyly provides the Comedic Fact:
And then the fact is abruptly linked to its celebrity . . .
I knew Oprah was fat and fat people like to eat, but . . . Zingo!
(ps - Leno writers watch your backs, I've got more where this one came from!)
Familiarity is the basis of the comedy, which is of course what makes it the kind of consistent thing you could do night after night. You don’t reveal anything people don’t already know, which they might not like and blame you for teaching them, you reveal things they already “know,” which they might also not like but couldn’t blame you for.
I knew Jackson did wear pajama bottoms to court that one day, and I do tend to associate pajamas with children, but I don’t see what’s funny about th... Oh ho!! Michael Jackson has sex with children, I knew that! Now I know it again in a funnier way!
The Jackson example actually seems to rely on the ambiguity of the Comedic Fact at work here. If Michael Jackson definitely did or didn’t molest children, these jokes would be less clearly in the realm of “safe” humor. But, some ambiguity around Jackson’s actual guilt (which luckily for Leno persisted beyond the end of the Jackson trial) seems to make the “fact” sufficiently palatable. It’s long seemed to me, though, that the ambiguity is a thin cover for the truth (even if I don’t know what it is): Either Michael Jackson had inappropriate sex with children, whose victimization is not a laughing matter, or he did not, in which case Jackson is the pitiable victim his fans make him out to be.
On the other hand, comedy is a tricky thing – often visceral in ways that other modes are not – which makes the declaration “That’s not funny” a difficult one to make stand up. That’s why humor is, I suppose, such a tricky rhetorical mode both to use and to evaluate.
On his weekly broadcast Le Show, Harry Shearer often reviews public apologies (probing the emptiness of that rhetorical form) – and nothing is more regularly to blame for saying things that end up requiring an apology than someone trying to be funny. It’s often amateur comedians who fall victim to this trap (a sherriff trying to be witty during a press conference, a trade group attorney trying to poke fun at his opponents, etc.) but it may be that strictly formal comedic techniques like Leno’s comedic fact monologue are another source of embarrassing mismatches of form and content. Once that machine is up and running, I guess it would be easy not to be able to tell the difference between the Comedic Fact of Janet’s top coming open and Michael’s alleged assault.
I’ll leave you with a quick look at another trouble spot I’ve noted before – attempts to leaven news stories. As I’ve noted, the catchy lede is a rhetorical machine that will spit out whatever you put in. And as this story on tighter US/Canadian border regulations suggests, so is the humanizing “man-on-the-street” closing reflection. A journalism classic, but one not without pitfalls, revealed here as Doug Graham of Linthicum, Md and AP writer Lara Jakes Jordan journalize ‘till it hurts:
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