The Daily Late Nightly Show (The Good and The Bad)

As we say goodbye to Larry, Larry, Larry I can’t help but say that certain parts of his show worked better for me than others. ‘Pardon The Integration’ was just kick ass funny every time it aired because Mike Yard and Rory Albanese are incredible writers and performers. Holly Walker and Ricky Velez had more good moments than bad and the rest of the on air crew was a mixed bag, perhaps due to the fact that they were on screen less frequently and didn’t have time to develop their personas as much as they might have.

The only one that was flat out horrible was Jordan Carlos. Maybe he didn’t get good material, but he was never very memorable even in his best bits. I guess being Stephen’s ‘Black’ friend can only take you so far if Stephen is not around anymore.

Unlike my activist brother I never felt the round table worked, though it did get better the shorter they made it. The problem with it as a segment is you always had people going for the cheap and easy laugh instead of talking about the issue with a sense of humor. Almost every guest Larry had in this segment was an important voice with things of substance to contribute and frankly, it was a waste of their time because they all got drowned out by his on air yuk staff doing the yuk thing which is what they get paid for of course.

He did much better with his interviews many of which I think were superior to anything Jon Stewart ever did (yup, including Cramer). I understand why Larry changed the format, he wanted to be different, but I think he would have been more entertaining (to me at least) if he’d gone more Charlie Rose/Dick Cavett instead of Crossfire.

His monologues were excellent and original. On nights when everyone else was a parrot slave of whatever the corporatist media was pushing he’d find a different issue to highlight. I suppose you could call that a ‘Black’ perspective, but I thought it an extraordinarily human one. On the days that I fail as a writer (at least for the site, I have other projects that are more long term) it’s because of the homogenized uniformity of the propaganda drek that is streaming through the Interwebz (I stopped watching Cable News entirely when Keith left).

I am very sorry that Larry is leaving us and am considering future directions that do not include late night talk of any kind since Stephen seems to have been lobotomized and Trevor doesn’t aspire except to being a low rent foreign accented Arsenio Hall.

Hey, Arsenio got Bill Clinton to play sax for him. That’s about as relevant as anything Trevor has ever done.