Late-Night Wars

Flipping through the channels, I sift the offerings of late-night TV. Eventually I settle on a talk show--what else?--but there's something wrong, disturbing. The host is a big-jawed, gap-toothed comic named Lenoman. It's a little unnerving--I was expecting Jay or Dave, not both--but Lenoman tosses off a one-liner to put me at ease, then leans into the camera, screws up his face and intones a single word: "Buttafuoco." The audience is with him all the way. I feel good, but all at once things get ugly. Lenoman has split back into his former selves, and they're fighting for control of the desk--Leno at one end, Letterman at the other, both gripping the corners, sweating and cursing and tugging like pro wrestlers. The audience is choosing sides, and an army of hosts storms in from the wings: Arsenio, Chevy, Rush, Shandling, Koppel and some new kid called Conan--a tall, carrot-top guy who leans into the camera, screws up his face and repeats a single word: "Buttafuoco," and again and again, "Buttafuoco, Buttafuoco."

•

I wake up in a West Hollywood hotel room--jet-lagged, late for my first meeting with Jay Leno and unable to shake the dream. For fans of late-night TV talk (hell, of late-20th century American comedy in general), it is surreal that the two funniest men in the chat-show universe are going head-to-head in the same time slot.

After more than a decade of knowing that The Tonight Show leads to Letterman just as surely as watching them makes us late for work, we must now learn to surf between the two shows--using a remote to customize our own Lenoman program, deciding minute by minute who fits our state of mind, who's delivering the laughs right now.

Despite the best efforts of Chevy Chase and Arsenio Hall, most viewers in a not-ready-for-Nightline mood will tune in to Lenoman--"I think it does come down to me and Dave," says Jay--and the struggle for control of their hearts, minds and zappers will turn 11:35 P.M. Eastern into ground zero of the Late-Night (continued on page 140)Late-Night Wars(continued from page 128) Wars. Where's my flak jacket?

Articles on talk shows are starting to read like dispatches from a war zone, with headlines hollering about secret weapons and strategies for victory. But battlefield language doesn't really suit these guys. Leno and Letterman are not enemy generals so much as chief executives of rival companies--hugely profitable whoopee-cushion concerns.

"Girding ourselves for battle?" asks longtime Late Night head writer Steve O'Donnell. "I guess, if that means doing what we've always done--desperately scramble to fill an hour a night without losing that last shred of self-respect."

Don't expect Arsenio-style declarations about "kicking ass" from these guys. But just because everyone is being polite, don't assume the stakes are low. Moving to this side of midnight was essential to Letterman--as important as the $42 million CBS is paying him for three years--because he's tired of running a carnival in the wilderness. He wants to test himself against Tonight and Nightline, but that doesn't mean he's suddenly going mainstream. Letterman has been so influential that the mainstream has come to him. Besides, he's been smoothing away a few of his jagged edges (no more torturing Teri Garr) and deep-sixing the goofier stunts (no more donning the suit of potato chips and plunging into a huge vat of onion dip).

With time, that has led him closer to a (gulp) plain old talk show. "I'm 46 years old," Letterman has told his cohorts. "I don't need wacky hats." Dave will always be Dave, but Letterman has become more like Tonight.

At the same time, Tonight's becoming more like Letterman. Leno (who's now 43 and earns a paltry $3 million a year for his day job) seemed awfully stiff when he took over the desk--and no wonder, what with all those long knives sticking from his back.

"Doing The Tonight Show is like going to your girlfriend's parents' house," he says. "You don't want to be too funny or smartass, you just want to get in there. Once they get to know you, you can relax and be a wise guy."

Leno has never been the subversive that Letterman is. Jay wants nothing more than to get off a few good lines each night and give his guests a chance to do the same. Who would have thought such modest goals would run into so much opposition? "They hit you for six or eight months," he says, "and if you're still standing, then they move on."

He weathered endless off-the-set storms, starting with the great Carson backlash, continuing through the public firing of his manager and Tonight Show executive producer, Helen Kush-nick, and ending with NBC's agonies about whether to dump him and give Tonight to Letterman. Somehow, the tension made the show looser, riskier, funnier. Jay tried a lot of new gags, and some of them--phoning Al Gore, having Paula Poundstone do commentary from the political convention floors, escaping the studio for taped remote pieces--were unmistakably Dave-like.

Can it be? Are Jay and Dave morphing into the mighty Lenoman? "Nah," says Leno in his sarcastic bray. "David is David and I'm me. The problem is, we do have a similar sense of humor. We laugh at the same things. One night Dave and I did exactly the same joke in both our monologs: 'Next week is national condom week. Now there's a parade you don't want to miss.' Nobody stole it from anybody; it just happened."

He's in his Tonight Show office, observing the amazing Leno Diet--spoonfuls of frozen yogurt chased with handfuls of microwave popcorn. ("My director says I'm getting too fat," Jay says. He wags his head and does a woman's singsong voice: "'September's coming and Dave is skinny and you have to get skinny.'") He and Dave work to avoid each other's terrain, but overlap is inevitable. After all, they come from the same planet, a middle-American outpost in the Bizarro Universe, where everything looks pretty normal but seems pretty funny. Their differences are mostly of degree: Leno is gentler, giving life a mere quarter turn before showing it to the rest of us. Letterman is bolder, more tortured and self-aware. In his hands, everything gets a harder twist.

Pick your favorite, but know that the two dovetail in the late night of the mind: Last spring, after Alaskan dogsledder Jeff King won the Iditarod, he was asked if he'd like to be on Letterman. "To fly all that way and have a guy embarrass you, I don't know if I'm up to that," King said. So he agreed to appear on Leno, instead.

Someone in Jay's camp thought it would be funny if King mushed his huskies up a hallway in the Burbank studio. Leno applied the Letterman test--is it too Dave-like? He called Letterman's producer, Robert Morton.

"Morty said they'd done something like it once, but he didn't have a problem if we wanted to try," says Leno. Jay, though, had a problem. He doesn't like to follow Dave's sled tracks more than he has to (Dave has a decade-long head start, after all). Then Leno started getting calls from animal-rights activists.

"It's amazing to me how seriously everybody takes this stuff," says Leno, yelping like one of those huskies. "It's a comedy show. Shut up. It's a joke."

Wearing his trademark denims, his hair grayer than it was a year ago, he sits behind a generic little desk in a generic little room that bears not a trace of the public Leno: no photos, no memorabilia, no framed articles, no honorary degrees.

Here's a guy whose image verges on cartoonish--he is blessed, after all, with that oversized head, that leering, rubberized Leno-mask of a face--who wants a workplace free of the persona. "It's like a hotel room," he says. "I check in every day and I carry my stuff out at night. I don't get comfortable or uncomfortable. I don't get ecstatic or wildly depressed."

If he sounds like a ballplayer in a roller-coaster pennant race, no wonder. Leno's season of travail started the moment he took over for Carson. Everyone decided he wasn't up to it. "This new man," declared would-be TV critic Jimmy Breslin, "is going to chase people off into the night."

"It helps to develop a really thick skin," says Leno, who thickened his years ago by telling jokes in a Boston strip club where audience members stubbed out their cigarettes on him for extra amusement. "You have to revel in it. You say, 'Take a shot, see what happens. Hit me again.' That's what I used to like about Jake LaMotta. He wasn't the greatest fighter, but you could just keep hitting the guy."

Critics kept hitting Jay. He was too awkward, they said, too bland, too nice to his guests. They even attacked his band. Jay's ratings, weak at first, started to improve, and advertising picked up. But suddenly, NBC, scrambling for a way to keep Letterman, was talking about dumping Leno. At one point there was speculation that nice-guy Jay might swap spots with Dave, moving to a 12:35 slot just to keep Dave at NBC--a notion Leno soon quashed. "I'm not that nice. If NBC gives my job to Dave," he said, "I'm outta here."

NBC let Leno hang while it decided who would rule the wee hours. But something funny happened while Jay was hanging--in fact, lots of funny things happened. Leno mined the situation for laughs. During one show the phone rang on his desk. "It's CBS," he said. "Well, thank you. Thank you. But, oh, no, this is Jay. You want David. Can you call back in an hour?"

"There's been an awful lot of teasing about what's going on," he said on another night, "but today I got a lovely card from the folks at GE and NBC." He held it up to the camera: Merry Christmas, Occupant.

Then Garry Shandling came out to plug his HBO talk-show parody, The Larry Sanders Show. "It's cable," Shandling said, "but there's a lot of job security." And Marsalis introduced a new Tonight Show theme--Stand by Your Man.

"I felt for Jay," says Marsalis. "He kept it to himself, but I know he felt betrayed. He knew he'd be all right, but he worried about his staff--people were wondering if they would lose their jobs."

Leno called a meeting to tell the staff what he knew, which wasn't much. Marsalis stood up. "I can't speak for anyone else," he said, "but I'll cover Leno's back." Leno's back didn't need watching for long. NBC stood by him, letting Dave go and setting up this clash of talk-show titans, this Late-Night War. I expect Leno to scoff at the media hysterics--"Shut up, it's just TV"--but he surprises me again. "I understand it," he says. "I have a hard time even watching the local news now. Every day it's carjackings and murder, and suddenly this story comes along. It's about rich people, television, humor--it's fun. It's important, but not really." He gives the cockeyed grin. "It's the kind of story I like to make fun of in my monolog."

Leno strides onstage a few hours later, playing the air-guitar lick that cues the band to stop. He rolls into his monolog, needling Bill Clinton and then Bob Dole ("Doesn't he look like he should have an eye patch and a parrot?"), getting a huge laugh thanks to Richard Simmons, who has been "accused of sexual harassment--by a woman. Even Anita Hill is going, 'Oh, come on.' "

Funny stuff, but fairly standard: Quick setup, then boom. Leno's a joke mechanic. He values timing and precision in his monolog the same way he does in his collection of 19 classic motorcars. And he prefers humor that springs from insight--skewed-attitude stuff that may not even have a punch line. Such comedy is tough to do on TV these days. In a club there's time for a setup; on the tube, in the age of channel surfing, there had better be a laugh within seven seconds or, click, you're history.

Ten jokes into this monolog he tries a fairly abstract one about the scientists who devised "the world's most accurate atomic clock: It won't lose a second in a million years." He pauses, selects a matter-of-fact voice. "How do you set this clock? You think the guy who invented it goes, 'Yo, Phil, got the time?'" It takes the crowd a moment, but then it's with him. "You think on Fridays the guys who work on this clock try to move the hands forward so they can sneak out early?"

Jay's favorites aren't always the ones that go over best. His audiences--the 500 people in the studio and the 5 million in their bedrooms--come from all over the map in age, attitude and sense of humor. So he comes right back with "something really stupid--a new telephone service you can call to test your IQ over the phone. They charge you $3.95 a minute." Monumental laughter and applause. "It's a pretty simple test: If you make the call, you're an idiot. And finally, in what has to be the strangest story of the week, a North Carolina woman, with a little help from her friends, used a turkey baster to inseminate herself. I'll tell you one thing--that's one house you don't want to go to for Thanksgiving dinner. 'Oh, I'll just have a little cranberry sauce, thanks.' " The place goes nuts.

•

Eight hours later, Leno still savors the moment. "The turkey baster was huge," he says, meaning the joke, not the baster. "It's so disgusting." Jay is sitting in the stone-and-wood kitchen of his Tudor-style Benedict Canyon home, getting ready to start the second shift of his long workday. It's late. Leno does nine-to-seven in the office--including the taping from 5:30 to 6:30--takes a few hours off and then, around 11 P.M., meets at his kitchen table with one or more writers for the nightly feeding of the beast: chewing 250 jokes down to the 15 that will make up the next day's monolog.

"Most comics who do three shots a year on The Tonight Show worry about having enough material," says Jim Brogan, one of Leno's writers and old friends. "Jay does eight minutes every night. It's astounding."

"OK," says Leno, "what do we have here?" He begins going through the stack of index cards. On each is a joke he has plucked from a freelancer's fax, his writers or his imagination, because it offers some hope of a laugh. Now he speed-reads each one aloud, flipping the rejects onto an empty chair, sorting the rest into several piles: Yes, first cut, needs work.

Jay's a little sad tonight because he has some great David Koresh jokes--a staple of his monolog for the past 50 days--that he can't use because the Waco compound has burned. Jay doesn't joke about such things--in public. "Poor Koresh," he sighs. "That's what you get for trying to keep up with the Joneses."

Now he's left with Clinton, Bush, Dole, Perot, Yeltsin, La Toya Jackson, the Navy's Tailhook sex scandal--jokes that leap from the news and usually fly right into the reject pile. Brogan, his long, ascetic face in a frown, is the sternest judge of material. Jay gets excited; Jim shoots it down. "No, Jay, I don't think it's quite enough."

By two A.M., the man Jerry Seinfeld calls Robocomic is looking pretty damn human: He's barefoot, bone-tired and prodigiously rumpled--as close to horizontal as his wooden chair will allow. Then he gathers himself and reads 15 jokes into a small tape recorder, editing and honing as he goes. In the morning the tape will go to the cue-card man.

By the time they have the material set, it's usually three A.M.

Six of the 15 hours in Leno's average workday are spent on the monolog--the heart of Tonight, the jokes America repeats at the office coffee machine. Leno's monolog is his lodestar--it led him to this job--and it's the one part of the show he can fully control. Dave's opening remarks, on the other hand, are an antimonolog, mostly attitude from a guy who knows how to lean way in and look up the camera's skirt.

Of course, Jay was learning along with Dave in the early Eighties, becoming a star thanks to frequent appearances on a show called Late Night with David Letterman. How close were they back then? "I guess you could say it was a professional friendship. We didn't hang out together. Dave's a jock, he likes to go to games and I don't. To me, the measure of it is whether you truly respect and like someone. David makes me laugh and was always very generous about letting me get laughs. He always let me do what it is that I do.

Leno had a gift for coming up with the little phrases that Letterman liked to repeat throughout a show. One night they were talking about popular tourist attractions, and Leno mentioned that he'd "just been out to the old Manson place."

"The old Manson place," said Letterman, obviously delighted. For the rest of the hour, he intoned those four words at regular intervals, until they came completely unhinged.

(continued on page 158)Late-Night Wars(continued from page 142)

"It was fun to find things Dave could plug into," says Leno.

•

"When all else fails," Letterman advises Conan O'Brien, his replacement in the Late Night slot, "just say 'Buttafuoco.'"

He's delivering his Top Ten list of hints for the new host: "GE executives are pinheads. NBC executives are boneheads. Don't panic if you find a strange woman in your house."

Nobody really expects O'Brien to start insulting the network brass or repeating Joey Buttafuoco's name like a mantra. Aping Letterman would be professional suicide, and Conan's comic sensibility is very different from Dave's.

"Conan is more naturally enthusiastic in a way David isn't," says one old friend of O'Brien's. "And he's not so tortured about television. You know how Dave sometimes despises what he does for a living? Conan loves it."

O'Brien, 30, has been learning by doing: When NBC unveiled the new Late Night host on Leno's show, O'Brien made it clear that he needs all the helpful hints he can get. Everybody is rooting for the guy, if only because giving him the show is the first positive thing NBC has done in recent memory.

The network could have chosen a washed-up, thrice-failed talk-show hack. Instead, it took a gutsy shot. But O'Brien tested that bravery with some shaky outings: On Tonight he looked as if he might turn into televised road kill. I was waiting for a camera to glide across the polished floor and finish the kid off. When O'Brien spoke, he sounded more like a Miss America finalist than the new prince of after-hours irony.

"This is something I've wanted to do all my life," he told Leno. "I'm ecstatic."

Leno came to the rescue. "You know," said Jay, giving it his cartooniest delivery, "Dave Letterman is a legend here at NBC, and if there's anything fun to do, it's replacing legends at NBC. I know."

"I'm thrilled," O'Brien said. "This is like a huge shock to me." Whew.

"Well, I'm excited," said Leno, "because to me it'll be great to see someone else's name in the paper all the time." O'Brien laughed--a sign of life--so Leno fed him a straight line. "I don't know what you're doing for music."

"Branford says he'd do it."

Budda-boom--his first televised rim shot! Across the set, Marsalis nodded and jerked his thumb: "I'm outta here."

Conan the Comedian (the New York tabloids come up with a name for everything) is the Boston-area product of a Harvard Lampoon cabal that's taking over television comedy ("In six years, you'll all be working for us," says O'Brien). He may be unknown outside the Late Night--Saturday Night Live--Simpsons axis, but those who know him describe a sense of humor that's never meanspirited, one that gets its kick from non sequiturs and jarring directional shifts.

The first glimmer of the guy's talent and charm came a week after he'd been chosen, during a half-hour-long ad-lib for the press. In the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, NBC laid out a nice spread for the media horde--snacks, booze--and 50 photographers responded by jumping on chairs and screaming at the first sight of O'Brien's broad, ruddy Irish mug: "Conan! Conan! Look over here, Conan!"

Two hundred scribes were on hand to ask the usual penetrating questions.

"How'd you get your name?"

"I believe that it's the Gaelic word for 'wide face.' "

In the audience, a man with a pronounced stutter, wearing a baseball cap and a phony mustache, asked whether anything on O'Brien's set had "Garry Shandling's name crossed out"--an unkind reference to NBC's first choice for Conan's job.

"Hey, you're from Howard Stern's show," cried O'Brien, and he was--Stuttering John, commando of the celebrity ambush. Chevy Chase once came close to punching this guy; O'Brien took a wiser approach. "Hey, let me shake your hand." He leapt off the podium, plunged into the crowd and gave Stuttering John's paw a vigorous shake.

"By the way, how is Howard?" Conan asked. "Can I come on his show sometime and be humiliated?"

Stuttering John had a follow-up: "Will you study The Dennis Miller Show and do every single thing differently?"

"Come on!" O'Brien was outraged. "Dennis is a good guy. But, yes, I will." He was getting big laughs now. "Hey, I'm enjoying this," Conan said, and it showed. Had he given much thought to the show's format? "We're going to do a Top 30 list. The jokes won't be as good, but there'll be three times as many."

Then he risked a serious remark. "Let's face it, I found out about this job a week ago. I'm 30 years old, I'm not that bright and this is going to take some time. We're going to have to find this show. I'd like to create an environment where we can experiment. That's the only way to do it."

Getting serious was a bad move--it reminded the reporters that they're paid to be skeptical. "How are you going to make the affiliates feel good about that approach?"

"By lying to them. That's all I can do, really."

Suck up to the affiliates: If O'Brien has learned that rule already, he's surely on the road to success. Leno's brilliant stroking of the NBC affiliates that carry Tonight may have saved his job. A retail comic in the way Bill Clinton is a retail pol--never tiring of the one-on-one that wins viewers or votes--Leno spends huge amounts of time keeping affiliates happy. He's always taping another promo, making another call, sitting through another interview with the nice folks from WXYZ. And when NBC started thinking about dumping him, all those nice folks made their feelings known: Give the guy a chance. He's good and getting better.

Now it's Letterman who's sending a message to affiliates. CBS is asking 50 stations to dump or delay Arsenio Hall's syndicated show in favor of Letterman's new program. (Arsenio, now carried by more than 200 stations, is in trouble. His ratings have dropped, and 71 Fox stations are moving him deeper into the night to make room for Chevy Chase's show.)

Letterman won't have trouble wooing stations away from Hall. Dave is likely to pull in twice the ratings Arsenio gets. Dave's prospectus boils down to this: I'm not too weird for 11:30. If there's a question about Letterman's move, it's whether his humor will work as well in the earlier time slot. It's a question that amuses folks who know him. "We're talking about him doing the same thing one hour earlier in a studio five blocks from where he's always been," says humorist Randy Cohen, a Late Night writer for eight years before leaving in 1991. "People talk about it as if he's going to be broadcasting from ancient Athens."

Here's the real deal: After 11 years, is Dave still a TV radical? "Not anymore," says Cohen. "His point of view was so influential and spread so far that it has become utterly familiar." That's a triumph and a burden--some folks who once watched Dave devoutly stopped doing so because they got tired of the joke. How many times can you send up dumb culture before the send-up itself seems just as dumb?

Letterman knows this--it's the source of the exquisite grimace he uses to follow his big phony smile, and it's one reason he phased out so many of his pranks. He hasn't lost energy, just learned to make the long haul gracefully. He has also gained confidence, so he doesn't need to get laughs from overwrought stunts, good as they were (his minions once overdubbed an entire show--it sounded like a bad Japanese import. Dave's part was read by the guy who did Speed Racer in the Sixties cartoon). Ideas like that work only once, and Late Night ran through reams of them before Dave said "enough."

"He realized that his talk and personality were the attractions, not whether we writers could think up more weird structures," says Steve O'Donnell. "That stuff was there only for him to play and elaborate on spontaneously. Marching midgets and mermaids in go-carts are easy, but weirder isn't always funnier. Surreal isn't an end in itself."

Now the show tries little things--electronically altering bandleader Paul Shaffer's voice "for security reasons"--and Letterman sometimes grows impatient with even these.

"And we have no idea why your voice is like that?" he asked Shaffer.

"Let's just say," came Shaffer's booming reply, "that certain executives would be in a more relaxed state of mind if my voice were scrambled, as it is now."

"OK," Letterman replied, "Let's just say we're tired of the bit."

With Dave, of course, hating the gag is part of the gag. Patent showbiz insincerity has carried him for years. "If we could pass one thing on to our children, our friends, our neighbors, it would be to be in a wonderful mood," he said at the top of the program, with a phony smile that gave way to a grimace, then turned back into a phony smile.

Dave's mood was hard to read that night, but it wasn't wonderful. He seemed to have the best time interacting with a non-showbiz "civilian" named Meg Parsont, the levelheaded young woman who works near a window of the publishing house across the street from Late Night's Rockefeller Center studio. Dave likes to call Meg and chat, and the "external camera" pokes through the venetian blinds and finds her.

Sometimes, Dave gets Meg to do things for him. The night Shaffer's voice was scrambled Dave said, "We want you to throw beach balls out the window, but for the life of me, I can't remember why."

Well, it was funny to see them fall 13 stories to 49th Street, where stage manager Biff Henderson, dressed in a green Hawaiian shirt, was knocking into cars and buses while trying to catch the balls in a big metal washbasin.

Dave loved it. "To me, that's your show. Everyone else can pack up and go home." Packing up was on his mind. "You know we're going to CBS pretty soon," he told Meg, "so I don't know if I'm going to get a chance to talk to you before we blow outta this dump. Meg, will you be able to come with us or not?"

Meg sounded sad. "I think I have to keep my job here."

"I don't want to catch you with the new guy, you know what I'm saying?" said Dave. "By the way--the new guy is here today. Are you excited about that?"

"Are you?"

Letterman grimaced, playing it for laughs. "Well, yeah. Sure." He looked miserable, but when O'Brien came out, Dave was as gracious as he's ever been.

"How ya doin'?" Dave asked.

"I'm all right," O'Brien said, then confessed: "This is weird."

It was weird for both of them. You could see it on O'Brien's unlined face and on Dave's face, too, now weathered from 11 years of talk-show tension.

"You haven't had other talk shows in the past, have you?" Dave asked.

"I've had five--they all failed miserably and now I'm getting this one."

Letterman helped O'Brien to his funniest appearance yet. To prove he had performing experience, Conan played a video clip of himself lurking in the background of various Saturday Night Live sketches. Then Letterman did something most un-Dave-like: He allowed himself a brief moment of genuine, televised emotion. "We've had great fun here," he told O'Brien, "and we've had wonderful times and terrific success. And I certainly wish all of that for you." He grabbed O'Brien's hand, shook it hard, smiled for real and let his voice rise: "Conan O'Brien, ladies and gentlemen. It's the new guy. Look, it's the new guy!"

It was a Jay-like moment--a sweet taste of Lenoman.

After Conan left, Dave became himself again. "He was very pleasant," he said about O'Brien, "and as soon as we went to a commercial, he was backstage yelling and calling people names: 'Out of my way, punk. I'm taking over. This dump is mine now. You geeks is history.' That's the ugly side of show business." Then Dave introduced Kenneth Branagh, "a very entertaining actor, director and writer, and recently punched unconscious by Conan O'Brien. That's the truth! That's the damn truth!"

Which Dave will host the new show? Here's hoping it'll be the same surly guy we know so well. But I wouldn't be surprised to see more flashes of sweetness. Can we expect any other changes in the program? "My relatives keep asking me that," says Steve O'Donnell, "and I tell them the new show will have the same ingredients, but it'll be a Western."

The changes fall into two categories: cosmetic and contractual. The cosmetic changes will include all the usual vanities of the talk-show form: the desk-and-chairs setup that Letterman calls home base, the mural backdrop, the band (it might include a horn section, the better to stack up against Marsalis' outfit). The contractual changes depend on how difficult NBC wants to be. Along with the Late Night name, the network owns the rights to such rubrics as Viewer Mail and Top Ten. "So you might see a drastic change from Top Ten to Big Ten," says O'Donnell, "or maybe Top Nine." (Letterman's set once featured a fountain called Dancing Waters. When the holder of that trademark complained, Dave started calling it Prancing Fluids. True to form, Letterman's new entry will be called The Late Show.)

Beyond that, the show will be pretty much what it has been: Dave talking, visiting with people, doing goofy stuff when the mood strikes. "People who expect us to change everything because it's on an hour earlier have an exaggerated idea of how carefully we can calibrate the product," says O'Donnell. "We've always done what Dave thought was funny and what we thought was funny. I don't see how that can change. I don't see how what Jay or anybody else does can affect what we're doing. We're too crazed trying to get our thing done to notice what anyone else is up to."

Out in Burbank, Leno and his crew are saying the same thing. "I never worried too much about what the next guy was doing," says Jay. "When David and I and Freddie Prinze and Richard Pryor were all working the same club, if all the comics were good, then it was a good show. If we all were bad, then it stunk. It's the same now: If everybody on late-night television is good, then late-night becomes this innovative area where creative stuff is happening. It attracts attention and increases the total audience. And it makes everyone work harder to be that much funnier. There's 250 million viewers out there. Some of them are going to watch David. Some are going to watch Jay."

And some of them won't settle for anything less than Lenoman.

"Letterman is bolder, more tortured and self-aware. In his hands, everything gets a harder twist."