Once in a while I would watch Jay Leno on Monday nights. I waited through the monologue for the headlines. The monologue was often a predictable litany of: bush has the mind of an infant, Jennifer Lopez has a big butt, the people of the UK have bad teeth.’
His writers went on strike for a few weeks - Jay Leno became funny! Once his writers returned the jokes reverted to their same boring formulas.
I knew a guy who knew a Carson writer. He said every day, they would write a big stack of great jokes, and Carson would throw them out: “Too good. Too good. Too good.” Jokes that bombed was Carson’s main schtick.
Last month I watched about 2 hours of Leon’s Headlines on the big tv with my son. They are all on YouTube. They never stop! After a while we’d had enough. Took a while before we had to stop, though. Couples who put wedding announcements in their local papers like “the Slammen Beaver Wedding” take a while to get old!