Leave it to my friend Bill Carter at The New York Times, the dean of late night TV chroniclers, to nail down the news Wednesday that not only would Jimmy Fallon indeed be replacing Jay Leno on the “Tonight” show before the fall of 2014, but that the show would return to its New York City base it left in 1972 when Johnny Carson took it to Burbank.
Leno refused to address the news in his Wednesday monologue, though he kept up the jokes about his network’s failures (this one, like the rest of his monologue, was not particularly funny. The set up line was that scientists are getting closer to finding a way to get to a real life “Jurassic Park.” “Things once thought to be extinct could be brought back from the dead — so there’s hope for NBC! It could turn around.”).
Fallon, by contrast, and helping to show why he’s more fresh and immediate than the current “Tonight” show host, went immediately to the news in his stand up opening, saying, “Before we get started, I have to talk about the rumors which came out today, which says that I’ll be moving up to 11:30, or as my parents call it, ‘Oh, it’s still too late.’
“Actually it’s true,” Fallon went on. “NBC is turning the ‘Tonight’ show into a diving competition.’ Which led to a joke about ABC’s “Splash.”
One odd thing about the two monologues, given an hour apart, is that they each had an identical joke about the guy who found a way to power his car with coffee. “With gas prices what they are, you want to get Starbucks involved?”