Monologue

July 27, 2015
Macks, a veteran writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, explores the history of late-night comedy shows in America and the different styles of hosts and jokes that continue to draw audiences. He argues that late-night comedy provides a way to make sense of the ever-increasing news-media overload. He devotes most of the coverage to his former employer Jay Leno, but manages to draw out interesting views on many of the most popular hosts, including Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and Jimmy Fallon. Reader Heller rises to the task of narrating a book that is about comedy and contains its fair share of jokes, derived from Mack and the various hosts. When it’s clear who is telling the joke, Heller provides a hint of impersonation, just to give the listener the flavor of the speaker. In general, Heller has the comic timing down, which improves the laughs in this book, but he still must deal with a good deal of jokes, often one-liners, that themselves feel a bit flat. A Penguin/Blue Rider hardcover.

March 1, 2015
The top writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno offers some reflection on late night's influence but mainly shares jokes and anecdotes.Macks (How to Be Funny, 2003), who has also written for most of the top awards shows and many of the leading politicians, is more ambitious in theme than execution. He promises a book about "the larger meaning of how late-night comedy monologues and sketches can influence and impact us," but he mostly discusses Leno and the experience of working for him. Leno, it seems, is a great guy who won the late-night ratings wars because he was the most talented and likable. Macks knows how tough it is to be funny night after night, and he has plenty of respect for anyone who does it. Throughout, he borrows jokes from all of them, along with reprinting Leno's first monologue post-9/11 in its entirety and chronicling the arc of Bill Clinton as a font of material. Readers get a sense of what it's like to have the job of "feeding the monster," writing 100 or so jokes per day for a comedian who will select 15 or 20 from among a thousand. Macks calls himself "Jonny the Joke Boy," and though he moved to comedy from running political campaigns for Democratic candidates, he and Leno never let political affiliation get in the way of a laugh: "When it comes to jokes, I'm a writer first, Democrat 615th." The author has little in the way of dirt to share, though his contempt for the presidential campaign of Al Gore is evident throughout (he's much more of a Clinton apologist), and he praises "Charlie Sheen, a great guy and a great guest." But mainly he shares jokes, his own and those of others. A book that seems to have been written because a writer has to do something after his regular gig of two decades disappears.

April 1, 2015
Macks, a longtime writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, breaks down something that appears to be fairly simplethe talk-show monologueand shows that writing something punchy, timely, and entertaining isn't so easy. Drawing on his 20-plus years of writing jokes, Macks examines not only what makes something funny, but also how a joke can help shape public opinion and public behavior and what constitutes inappropriate material (one of the author's primary rules: don't make fun of who people are, make fun of what they do). There are lots of famous names in the bookLeno, Letterman, Kimmel, O'Brien, Stewart, Colbert, Short, Fey, Martin, Crystaland readers looking for some behind-the-scenes intel on the big stars and the popular late-night shows won't be disappointed. It is worth noting that this isn't an investigative report like Bill Carter's classic The Late Shift (1995); it's a lighthearted, informative account of the creation and impact of that deceptively simple verbal phenomenon, the joke, and, in particular, the jokes told on late-night TV. Without Jon Stewart on late night, fans may need something else to do: this book should help.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)