On Sunday, we linked up to a New York Times piece that explained in-depth how the now famous Super Bowl ad featuring Jay Leno, Oprah Winfrey and David Letterman came about. In short, it was a total CIA-like operation. Last night on his show, Leno gave his studio audience his own version of the story, saying that the past 18 years of animosity between the two late-night giants is all but gone. And they have the Super Bowl ad to thank for it. Leno tells the story below. Check it out.

If you watched/are watching the Super Bowl tonight, you more than likely caught the brief Late Show with David Letterman commercial featuring Oprah Winfrey and longtime adversary Jay Leno. Regardless of whose side you’re on, it’s hard not to admit the commercial was hilarious. Of course, in our opinion, it still makes Letterman look funnier and Leno, well, just kinda there.

If you missed it or just want to relive it over and over again, here it is:

Anyway, the New York Times posted a great behind-the-scenes piece breaking down, in great detail, how the commercial came about. Writer Bill Carter writes, in part:

The spot was shot last Tuesday afternoon, under the strictest of secrecy which involved both Mr. Leno and Ms. Winfrey flying in surreptitiously to New York, and arriving incognito at the theater, while Mr. Letterman was in the midst of taping his show for that night. It also involved Jay wearing a disguise: hooded sweatshirt, glasses and faux mustache. If you happened to be on Broadway between 53rd and 54th street last Tuesday about 4:15, you might have seen a man fitting that description slip into the theater by a small entrance under the marquee.

The Times piece gets even further into the process. We recommend you check out the full article here.

For the the third night in a row, David Letterman is hitting at Jay Leno hard. We guess it makes sense. Letterman has nothing to lose. However, it’s funny that after poking fun at NBC sports chief Dick Ebersol for meddling in the Conan/Leno fight — saying it has nothing to do with him — Letterman is investing so much time in the same thing. We’re pretty sure Letterman has nothing to do with the Late Night wars at this point too. But we like him. So here’s what you’ll see tonight at 11:35 pm on CBS.

Meanwhile, Leno shot back at David Letterman tonight for his constant bashing from the last three nights. Check it out below:

After last night, when he barbed Jay Leno harder than he had since this whole late night situation began, David Letterman will once again take shots at his long-time rival when the Late Show airs tonight at 11:35 pm on CBS. Luckily, you can take a look now, a few hours before that.

In response to NBC sports honcho Dick Ebersol calling Conan O’Brien and David Letterman “chicken-hearted and gutless” for making fun of Jay Leno, someone “[they] couldn’t beat in the ratings,” Letterman struck back in tonight’s Late Show opening, to air at 11:35 pm EST. He basically likens Ebersol to a meddling mother who breaks up a fight between young boys and defends his position as one of the many lashing out at Leno by saying it’s “just fun.”

Letterman also does a few quick “Big Jaw” impressions, because, you know, why not? Check it out below before the show airs tonight!

Meanwhile, on Leno’s show tonight, he continued his vanilla-tinged jokes about the whole late-night debacle. Check out the clip below.

Later in the show, Leno addressed the entire genesis of the story, dating back to 2004. Check it out.

There’s another voice in late night that damn well deserves to be heard – even if it’s doing an impression of someone with an annoying voice. As you may have heard, Jimmy Kimmel performed his entire show last night as an exaggerated (or not) version of Jay Leno, the long time Tonight Show host who’s strong-arming his way back to 11:35 pm.

Here’s a few choice clips:

You can watch the rest on the Jimmy Kimmel Live youtube channel.

And in this clip, Leno’s former competitor for for the Tonight Show chair weighs in with his own obnoxious/hilarious impression (at approximately 1:30):

Not even cancer can stop comedian Steve Mazan from achieving his goal of appearing on the Late Show With David Letterman.

Where does time go is the one question that even Alex Trebek, sometimes more condescending know-it-all than Jeopardy! answer man, can’t explain. Not surprising, because we tend to forget that time flies…without layovers and, more important, without a flight plan.

Even those lucky humans with jet packs cannot outrace time. Anyway, comedian Steve Mazan teaches us that urgency, way more than rocket fuel, may be the greatest catalyst of all in the race against time, a lifelong competition that people consider more of a marathon than a sprint, until time catches up to them, typically with disbelief and, worse, without warning.

His inspiring lesson about the power of perseverance culminates in New York City on Sept. 4 with the airing of his appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman. After more than four years of essentially auditioning for the show at comedy venues nationwide and overseas (he has performed for U.S. troops seven times in Iraq and Afghanistan) and through performances on the 20 DVDs he has sent to Letterman’s booker, Eddie Brill, over time, Mazan flew about five hours from California to New York on Aug. 30 to record one five-minute joke at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Aug. 31, fulfilling a dream that began in 2005 after his startling cancer diagnosis.

He missed his original deadline (by more than three years), “but obviously dreams you give extensions to, you make exceptions,” Mazan, a native Chicagoan, says from Los Angeles, his home base now.

Until February or March 2005 (unlike many other cancer patients and survivors, he does not recall his exact D-Day), Mazan, 37 and a comedian for 10 years now, had been climbing steadily toward Mt. Letterman, what he and multitudes of other contemporary comedians consider the summit of success. “I always thought it would happen,” he says confidently, not vainly, “but I wasn’t pursuing it. I was doing my sets, and getting noticed and figured at some point that I’d run into the right people. I wasn’t rushing it or anything.”

The process became a contest soon after the unexpected diagnosis. While heading home from performing one evening, he remembers telling fellow comedian Gary Cannon, “You’re going to have to drive.” That night Mazan went to bed in pain and awoke in agony. What he suspected to be appendicitis turned out to be a rare form of intestinal cancer that had spread to his liver.

“The doctors told us [Mazan and his wife, Denise], ‘Look, the tumors are slow-growing. If everything goes OK, you could still live 10 to 15 years with this.’ Worst-case scenario, of course we asked about that, and they said, ‘Five years.’ And I thought, Holy shit, five years! What if I die in five years, what do I want to accomplish?”

Suddenly, he had no time to saunter to the top of the profession, but comedy does not move at a panting pace. It takes years of writing and rewriting jokes and testing and retesting them in clubs and theaters for fun and maybe little profit to clamber even close to the pinnacle.

So after five months of recuperating from surgery and initial treatment, in an Internet instant, Mazan, who speaks hopefully and optimistically and works as if he were 100 percent healthy, created DyingToDoLetterman.com, a Web site that chronicled his circumstances and career and asked fans, friends, friends of fans, friends of friends and visitors to the site to petition Letterman to book him. At the beginning, he explains, he used the site as an accelerant “to get noticed by the Letterman people.”

But almost immediately, without being mean, he says that Brill basically told him that Letterman is not a fairy godfather. He does not grant wishes. “They actually sent me a cease-and-desist letter,” Mazan says, chuckling. “I was told I would have to earn my appearance.”

It took more than three years and hundreds of types of jokes to impress Brill. Mazan, who’s turning the quest into a documentary with the apt help of husband-and-wife filmmakers Joke Fincioen and Biagio Messina of Joke Productions, finally did with a long gag about hotel access keys, the result of talent, commitment and that mandatory comic attribute: perfect timing.

A few weeks ago Larry Muhammed, a Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY) writer got in touch with me to see if I would answer a few questions about comedy, more specifically if people just couldn’t take a crass joke these days. The final article took a slightly different turn, focusing on the movie Bruno and the like. So sadly I had nothing to do with the article. But, I thought Larry asked some good questions. And I thought the questions and answers might start a good conversation here. So below, you’ll find my answers to said questions. Let us know know what you think in the comments section.

Michael Richards got mad and called a heckler n**ger, but Richard Pryor had a Grammy-winning album, That Nigger’s Crazy. What’s the difference?
The difference is context. First, Pryor was referring to himself. There’s obviously a big difference between a white comic calling an audience member a “N” in an effort to hurt that person emotionally during an angry rant and a comedian referring to himself as an “N.” It’s also important to note that Pryor used that word in that album and all of his performances an astronomical amount. Whether he meant to deflate the racist meaning behind the word or not is unclear. But by peppering it in constantly throughout his sets onstage, Pryor took the control of the word away from racists and gave the control back to black people.

What do you think of Letterman’s joke that A-Rod knocked up Sarah Palin’s daughter during a Yankee’s game, and how do you read his apology?
Letterman made it painfully clear in his apology that he thought he was talking about the of-age daughter, not the 14 year old. His researchers or writers gave him bad information and he went with it. Huge mistake. The joke was coarse, for sure, even if it was about the of-age daughter, but for Conservatives to call Letterman a pedophile is completely ridiculous and only hurts the image of Conservatives, who I assume are mostly level-headed people who simply disagree with the philosophies of more liberal-minded folks.

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