Word: letterman
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...elephant, wrapped head to toe in Christmas-tree garlands, he had the comic gravity of Buster Keaton and the acrobatic ambiguities of a four-legged pun. The pictures made Wegman, until then a lesser-known Conceptualist, the kind of artist who gets invited on Carson and Letterman. Four years after Man Ray died in 1982, Wegman acquired Fay Ray, a chocolaty female of the same breed who has been his muse and model ever since...
...cartoonish drawings and whimsies staged for the camera. Like the big, vaporous paintings he started showing in 1987, they have their moments of Thurberesque charm, but it's only the loopy dog pictures that click. Situated somewhere between Marcel Duchamp's cunning art pranks and David Letterman's Stupid Pet Tricks, they rib Conceptualism even as they lay out its possibilities. But in the end their effectiveness rests upon powers of portrait psychology that owe little to Conceptualist mind games...
...then he leapfrogged over Letterman. Whereas Letterman had once been NBC's choice to succeed Carson, Leno campaigned for the job. Leno is not what Letterman calls "a show-business weasel," but he was shrewd. "The thing that got me the Tonight show," he says, "is that I would visit every NBC affiliate where I was performing and do promos for them. Then they would promote me in turn. My attitude was to go out and rig the numbers in my favor." Nice guys don't finish last when they can also rig the numbers...
Leno became the obvious choice for NBC. His ratings showed that he kept Carson's core audience and also attracted some younger, more affluent viewers. Leno is more in synch with the zeitgeist: Letterman's pervasive irony seems less suited to the '90s than Leno's sincerity. For NBC, giving Letterman the job was a lose-lose proposition: the network would lose Late Night with David Letterman, the best and most profitable late-late-night show on TV, and it would lose Leno...
...McMahon will be gone, to be replaced by no one. Leno has earned the chance to occupy Johnny's chair, but now he must prove he can fill it. Although the show is an institution, it is Carson's institution, and Leno must make it his own. "Letterman," Leno says, "is a comedy show that happens to have guests. The Tonight show is a talk show that happens to have comedy." Leno is adept with the comedy; the guests are a problem. While Leno is peerless as a monologist, his interviewing is still amateurish. He sometimes seems like a guest...