Jay Leno’s transition from primetime failure to once-and-future host of the Tonight Show lasted about a minute and a half. The cold open of his new Tonight Show had him waking up in a sepia-toned sequence—with Betty White, because the Internet loves her—a la Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. (If you had “finds it was all a dream” in your office pool, you can probably still collect.) Then came the monologue, in which Leno said, “I’m Jay Leno, your host at least for a while” and “We were off for the last couple of weeks–kind of like the Russians at the Olympics!”
And then it was back to what could largely have been a Leno monologue from before The Jay Leno Show, right down to a set of jokes about the previous Presidential administration. For a while in Leno’s monologue, it appeared that Jay was not the only one who had been restored. A news item about Dick Cheney’s heart problems led to a string of golden-oldie Bush jokes, as if the former President too had suddenly taken back his old job from the new guy.
Clear message: well, that’s over! Who wants to hear an Alan Greenspan joke?
