should Leno have shown a corpse during his monologue?

[mopaul]

while making a joke about how ugly liza minnelli's soon to be ex husband is, they showed his pic alongside a pic of uday hussein, post mortum. the audience groaned and gasped strangely and the joke, for lack of a better term, bombed. i got the impression that this was not well received by the audience, and the guitarist, held his head in shame. what the hell? is this comedy?

[NewYorkerfromMass]

1. Nahhh. But it's a more honest way to joke about murder

than for example, Garret Morris joking about Idi Amin.

[whoYaCallinAlib]

2. I saw it . . . it was extremely more taste.

Even for Leno, it was a lowpoint of the night.

[Bluzmann57]

3. Gave up watching Leno a while ago...

After a ceaseless stream of Clinton sex jokes. Either him or his writers, or both need to come up with some new and obviously, more tasteful stuff. And I don't think Leno should joke about how ugly another man is. He's no prize, especially with the chin that could kill a man.

[Creamed Corn]

4. You're all too damn uptight.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

6. 1 out of 5 liked it I guess

[davidinalameda]

5. you're kidding!

someone needs to contact NBC and tell them that they don't appreciate seeing dead bodies without warning

[SoCalDem]

7. Jay Leno has not been funny for years

He never really was a ha-ha funny guy.. He's a hack..If NBC had somebody as kiss-ass as he is, but younger, he would be gone..

Probably most of the people tuned in to his show are asleep..

[Creamed Corn]

8. I'll agree that the Tonight Show is terrible

but long before the Tonight Show, Jay Leno used to be one of the greatest stand-up acts in the country. I doubt that his peers would say he was never really "ha-ha funny."

[NewYorkerfromMass]

9. Leno and David Brenner

from Philly were very funny stand-up contemporaries.

[ShimokitaJer]

10. Jay is funny... Tonight Show writers are not

I seldom watch the show, but when I do I'm always struck by how funny Jay is in his off-the-cuff remarks and how extremely un-funny his monologues and the little parody "bits" he does are. I'm sure Jay has some degree of control over what jokes to pick, but it's a pretty hard job thinking up dozens of jokes every night, while simultaneously attempting to avoid offending anyone in your core middle-American audience, and the result is a lot of really bad jokes.

The fact that every person on the Tonight Show staff responsible for screening these jokes, from the writers to the producer to Jay himself, thought that using a dead Iraqi for a sight gag would appeal to a mainstream audience -- that's what I find disturbing. I just hope they're wrong.