Save tonight

I was going to write a really indignant piece about the recent Tonight Show controversy, wherein poor old Conan O'Brien was effectively forced to quit as host of the venerable NBC late-night talk show to facilitate the return of lantern-jawed former host Jay Leno to the role he'd only vacated a few months previously.

Although Leno is very popular, he is an avowedly mainstream comedian who once summed up his job as "Write joke. Tell Joke. Get Cheque." Did you see him on Top Gear? It was hardly a riot of laughs, put it that way. Meanwhile, Conan has written for The Simpsons (the monorail episode!) and for me has always been a far more interesting, leftfield proposition. And if you haven't bothered to read the above link, suffice to say that Leno and NBC are widely held to be responsible for the whole mess, whilst Conan was the subject of popular campaigns to save his job (see right).

So yes, I was going to be all snarky and cynical, and then I saw the clip of Conan's final words to the viewers at the end of his last show. The key section, which properly choked me up, went as follows:
All I ask of you is one thing... I ask this particularly of the young people who watch. Please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen. I'm telling you, amazing things will happen.

This could be interpreted as Conan taking possession of the moral high ground and giving the best possible "fuck you" to NBC (who he did make sure to praise for all they'd done for his career). But it also came across as genuine and heartfelt. What it chiefly made me think about was how easy it is to be snarky and mean in this age of the largely anonymous blogosphere.

When I sit down to write, my brain always begins in its default setting of sneery sarcasm. Oh I could describe it as being a realist, but that's only really true when I'm making regular conversation in the "real" world. The internet has become a breeding ground for rudeness and cruelty because it encourages you to voice those thoughts that get filtered out by proper human society. In cyber terms, anything goes. There's probably a couple of instances of it above which I've not even thought about.

So from now on, I'm going to at least try to rein in the cynicism. I don't usually enjoy it when I read it, unless it's particularly well-written, and in those cases it's usually tempered by a geniune sense of righteousness. So I certainly shouldn't expect people to enjoy reading my stuff if it's stuck in perma-snark mode. Conan is right, it doesn't lead to anywhere useful. God bless you, Mr O'Brien. Even if you do end up on Fox.

(Ok, I'm starting from now.)

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