I remember back in the day in college we’d all gather around the TV at 11:30 pm, perhaps with a few beverages, to first watch Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show” and then David Letterman on his eponymously titled follow-up. Carson was a master, and although I never found Letterman to be as humorous as some of my buddies did, his Stupid Pet Tricks and other gags could be pretty darn funny. I mean, where else do you get to see someone toss a bowling ball off a five-story building?
Of course, those days are long gone now, and what we used to call “Appointment TV” has all but disappeared except in the world of sports and breaking news. Anything else, we can pretty much watch whenever we feel like it.
But Leno said in an interview with Deadline published Wednesday that the appetite for interesting conversation hasn’t disappeared — it’s just moved. The new king is not on late night, and he isn’t even on TV:
I mean, podcasts really are the new talk shows. Joe Rogan is the new Johnny Carson.
Yeah, Joe talks to everybody about everything. There’s no FCC to step in and say what you say and can’t say, so you really do get an unfiltered idea of what everybody thinks. So yeah, I mean, to me, that’s what’s also changed late-night.
I talk to young people — they don’t know CBS, NBC or ABC, Channel Four; they know Channel 682 or whatever. They just go to YouTube. Which is amazing. If you had predicted YouTube would be the most popular channel in the world 10 years ago, I think people would have said, “What are you talking about?” But it is now.
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One thing you can say about Rogan is that he's unfiltered (profanity):
Joe Rogan: "When you see them talking freeform like on those panel shows on CNN, you're like, 'Oh, you guys are f*cking retrded! You guys have some of the dumbest opinions. You're so uninformed.'"
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) June 19, 2026
pic.twitter.com/VAxDeRTTYL
Leno, who says he still does over 200 standup gigs a year, didn’t explicitly criticize the late-nighters of today like the odious Jimmy Kimmel and the toxic, recently-cancelled Stephen Colbert — who are mostly politicized robots who produce very few laughs — but he did say that playing only to one side is a losing strategy:
One of the questions the interviewer, [Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation CEO] David Trulio, asked me [in a 2025 interview] was something like, “How do you think you and Johnny handled politics?” Well, we tried to make fun of both sides equally. You know, you humiliate degrade everybody equally — that’s it. I mentioned the pressures of life and people cozying up to one side more than the other.
I said, “I don’t think anyone wants to hear a lecture. Why go for just half an audience?”
And half an audience, if that, is just what they've earned.
What else killed the once wildly popular late-night format? Commercials. Leno explained how the networks run more of them than they did during their heyday (profanity alert):
LENO: Yeah, so when I turn on late-night now, regardless of how I’m watching, if I see Jake from State Farm again, I’m gonna shoot myself in the f*cking head.
It’s like, geez … the host comes out, does the monologue, then it’s right away over to six minutes of commercials. You come back, the host talks about who’s coming up and everything out, “We’ll be right back,” and so on. All cut up.
Enough already.
Why watch that when I can switch over to streaming or YouTube and I can watch an hour with Harrison Ford talking off the top of his head, as opposed to just having few minutes with the guest or with the host, you know? Johnny used to have real conversations.
I tried to have real conversations. That’s seems to be gone, and the audience knows it.
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Here’s the lesson that Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Kimmel, Seth Meyers, "Saturday Night Live" writers, and Co. should write in huge letters on whiteboards in their bedrooms and ponder every single morning. Perhaps then they could get more people to care about their shows:
LENO: Yeah, like I said, we used to brag about the fact that Johnny and I would try to make fun of both sides equally. Looks like that doesn’t work anymore. The audience is all over the place.
I just think the most important thing is to remember: funny is funny.
Life changes, technology advances in mind-boggling fashion, and there’s no stopping it — we have to adapt. When I ran a business, I regularly had to completely revamp my operations as new developments flowed in relentlessly. Oh, now you need to learn coding and HTML because there are these new things called websites (and Wix hasn't been invented yet), now you need to get into e-commerce, now you need to learn search engine optimization and social media. Oops – forget all that, there’s now something called “Fulfillment by Amazon,” and you'd better get aboard that wave yesterday.
We did all those things, and even though I am no longer in the clothes business, I still try to keep up with the ever-changing landscape that is our world.
But I can’t lie, when all of us crowded around what back then was a massive screen — what would now be considered an itty bitty, extremely low-resolution 300-lb. dinosaur Sony 36” — it was a blast.
I won’t fight the future, but sometimes I can’t help but reminisce that the past had some pretty great moments, too.
Meanwhile, Leno is right about what went wrong — and why so much contemporary comedy is anything but funny.
