jay made the jokes the joke. dave was doing the other side of jokes. he wanted the laugh he wanted. these last two jokes are the intellectual property of nbc. who would have thought you would ever hear the words intellectual property and nbc in the same sentence? there was not much emphasis on that monologue for dave. because when we started on late night we weren t allowed to do a monologue. they were calling them opening remarks. if you called them a monologue and there were too many, you would have stepped on johnny s toes. now with that in mind, let s continue with the opening remarks. it was just a little off. it looked like a talk show, kind of. sometimes he wore sneakers, which was weird. and they talked about the events of the day. to a certain extent. but also more focused on weirdness than on the newspaper. dave is passing out ham. dave was a very new york-centered show. jay could be monica lewinski and
before. and, you know, the things that are happening in the headlines give rise to brand new jokes. we interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the united press. flash. the white house announces japanese attack on pearl harbor. world war ii was the most uniting war in the history of the united states. it was natural that the biggest comedian in america would participate in the war effort. i d like to stop the show for a few minutes here and explain exactly why we re here. we want you to buy extra war bonds. when the war started, bob hope really became the voice of america. people turned to him to make jokes about what was going on. he was not the first topical comedian but what bob did was take that topical monologue and add to it the vaudeville rhythms, the joke telling rhythms. how do you do, fellas? this is bob. this is bob command performance hope telling each nazi in russia today that crimea
comedy in the 1950s were still really derived from vaudeville. you know, those performers like bob hope had nothing more than their mind than just getting laughs and that was plenty. the guy who really came along and changed all that was mort sol. richard nixon is running for governor of california and i realize sometimes they want this material to be topical. he ll be running for something no matter when the show is on. so sorry. mort was the first person to talk like a human being on stage. it wasn t shmaltzy. he did for comedy what james dean and marlon brando did for acting which is he humanized it. i have to report to you that the largest news last week was the soviet space man invited to lunch by the queen as you know. just to put your minds at rest i probably will not say anything about the queen. [ laughter ] she hasn t mentioned me has she? he came out with a newspaper
host made its debut last night. jay leno emerged from behind the curtain. oh, i don t care if you laugh. i got the job. look at this. they are getting more press than the president. so start up your remote controls. a late-night race is about to begin. jay was a brilliant standup. he continued the tradition of johnny. he had a big group of monologue writers. that was the main writing on that show. he was writing the best topical jokes that anybody could write. democratic candidate bill clinton said he is also troubled by the amount of sex portrayed on television. clinton said where he comes from sex is a deeply personal matter between a candidate and his campaign volunteers. yeah. jay is more bob hope in the sense of set a punch line, set a punch line, he would tap into exactly the best joke of whatever happened that day. and because the big story in hollywood is still the fugitive. all right. but enough about michael jackson.
saturday night live to play some sort of role in the nation s healing. the question is, when is it okay to laugh again? on behalf of everyone here, i want to thank you all for being here tonight. especially you, mr. mayor. thank you. thank you very much. having our institutions up and running sends the message that new york city is open for business. saturday night live is one of our great new york city institutions, and that s why it s important for you to do your show tonight. can we be funny? why start now? it was that saturday night we decided, okay, you know, we re going to be able to do this again. and they slowly brought us through it. i think it s one of the finest moments in snl history. live from new york, it s saturday night!