Jay Leno is funny. Conan O'Brien is NOT funny.

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A guy who's main jokes consist in "Yah, you guys are clapping even realizing the joke sucked!", "Why did you say 'buhhhh'? The show is free!", and of course... always making stupid moves with his body whenever a joke sucks, which is almost everytime.

It's called self-deprecating humor. This is the essense of Conan, and completely alien to Jay. Jay will never risk making a fool of himself like that. See how uncomfortable Jay was with Jimmy Kimmel. Jay's humor is all about ridiculing others. Jaywalking being the most obvious. Even the misprinted headlines are done completely differently by Jay and Conan. Jay gets REAL headlines and ridicules the people in those headlines. Conan makes up the captions on advertising, and almost always ends with one that ridicules himself.

They're different senses of humor.

word Cake_For_Everyone!

They are different and they both have merit. Both monologues often suffer from the setup getting a better response than the punchline. I prefer Conan's hitting the punchline and waiting for the response. Jay's way of telling a joke is more like a song that trails off instead of ending. He'll get to a punchline but he'll keep going and talking and there's a smattering of applause throughout because often he doesn't end his jokes definitively.

Another thing I don't understand about Jay is that he says he likes to keep his humor a little more PG, no swearing, no blue material, etc. because he wants to produce a show that even his Mom will enjoy. But he keeps harping on topics like Hugh Grant's sexual dalliance, and OJ Simpson jokes. I'm not saying offensive jokes aren't funny but to me they are offensive in concept and Jay still thinks that they're squeaky clean because he doesn't swear or whatever. At least when Conan tells a joke about a celebrity caught in a sex scandal or something he's usually like "I can't believe the audience laughed at that" and who can forget the "I'm a-gonna go to Hell when I die" song he would use to acknowlege a particularly crass joke. I guess what I'm saying is that they both cover the same kind of material but Conan knows his audience is teens and college kids while Jay tries to sell the same raunchy material to senior citizens and pretends that he's running a class act when he's telling the same dick & fart jokes, at least be honest about it.

Of course Conan acts childish that's part of his character, the inappropriateness of the way he acts when he should be a respectable adult. Jay doesn't have much of a character, he just tells jokes. So Conan can generate a laugh based on a joke or bit, or just by the way he acts. Jay is pretty much reliant on the strength of the joke itself. As for the audience reactions both guys get cheered. Conan's audience erupts into thunderous applause all the time. I don't watch enough Jay to know if he gets that same reaction, I'm guessing he does from time to time. But with Jay it would have to come from a joke that the audience likes, whereas with Conan he usually gets cheered more for acting goofy than on the strength of his jokes.

Personally I don't think any of their jokes are particularly funny most of the time. Like I said, the setup is usually funnier than the punchline. So Jay usually goes for the most obvious punchline and Conan usually goes for the dumbest, the "I can't believe we couldn't come up with a better joke" approach and then gets the audience to laugh at the stupidity of it.

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Go away Hitler

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Leno's monologues can be simplified even more:

make a joke about French people (or Europeans)
make a joke about Asians

I can honestly say that I have never laughed at anything Leno has ever said.


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