The Vig

With the exception of the Betty White/Abe Vigoda ad for Snickers, this year’s Super Bowl ads sucked.  All of them.   Well maybe the Tebow ad, which was much better and much less political than anyone expected, shouldn’t be lumped in there, but the rest of them?  Yuck.

The Letterman ad goes into it’s own category.  First, it wasn’t a corporate ad.  It was a CBS house ad, not something created by corporate nitwits.  Second, it was Dave.  Third, it featured Dave’s longtime late-night nemesis Jay Leno.  Their feud, for lack of a better term, goes back almost 20 years now.  Is it all over?  Just like that?  Dave absolutely killed Leno last month during the whole Conan debacle.  And he did so gleefully, I might add.  What in the hell happened?

I sat stunned for a few seconds after the thing aired.  I seriously couldn’t believe everyone was in one room.  I originally thought it had been done as a split-screen thing, like Michael and LaToya at the “We Are the World” sessions.  Not true.

The spot was shot last Tuesday afternoon, under the strictest of secrecy which involved both Mr. Leno and Ms. Winfrey flying in surreptitiously to New York, and arriving incognito at the theater, while Mr. Letterman was in the midst of taping his show for that night. It also involved Jay wearing a disguise: hooded sweatshirt, glasses and faux mustache. If you happened to be on Broadway between 53rd and 54th street last Tuesday about 4:15, you might have seen a man fitting that description slip into the theater by a small entrance under the marquee.

This could only happen because Dave made it happen.  From the outside it almost looks like a Michael-Fredo reunion with Dave as Michael and Jay as Fredo.  Only Leno never got clipped for betraying the family.

The family, you say?  I just finished reading I’m Dying Up Here by William Knoedelseder.  It’s the story of the 1979 comedians strike against the Comedy Store.  ESPN’s Bill Simmons mentioned the book on his Sports Guy podcast last month while talking Conan with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Tim Goodman.  Long story short, in the mid-to-late-seventies, the path to comic stardom went through Johnny Carson and the path to Carson went through the Comedy Store.  While at first comics were happy to work for free in exchange for the opportunity to be seen by entertainment executives, they eventually saw themselves as cheap labor for an establishment which was making loads of money.  They wanted a cut…the Store’s owner Mitzi Shore didn’t want to give it to them…so they struck.

As the story builds, you see names of folks who got their start at the Comedy Store and went on to bigger things.  Names like Robin Williams, Richard Lewis, Andy Kaufman, Elayne Boosler, and Gallagher.  You read about how Kaufman negotiated his Taxi contract so he would only have to be on the set one day a week.  How comics would watch Mork and Mindy in horror as Robin Williams stole borrowed bits from them.  And how Dave transitioned from comic to emcee, the role he was born to play.

For the most part, these folks were all blood brothers and sisters, particularly coming out of the strike experience of 1979.  They’ve all been tremendous boosters of one another’s work.  That’s why, for example, you’ll see Jimmie Walker still pop-up on Letterman a few times a year.  Tom Dreesen too.  And that’s why the Leno-Letterman schism hurt so much in ‘93.  They’d all spent so much time scratching and clawing their way to the top while still looking out for one-another, it was shocking to see Leno come in and take the job Dave had been groomed for for so long.

According to Knoedelseder, prior to last Tuesday, there was one previous moment when Leno and Letterman could have been in the same room.  It was 2003 when  their mutual friend and Comedy Store veteran George Miller passed away.  Leno showed up for the memorial service but Letterman, who was battling shingles at the time, did not.  It was only because he was so ill that he didn’t show.

So is it over?  My initial reaction says probably not.  But there’s a little bit of a thaw there.  It’s nice to see.  It would be an awful thing if they took this thing all the way to their graves.