Goodbye, Jay

Jay Leno is leaving "The Tonight Show" for the second time - this time he means it - with his last show being tonight.  A Baby Boomer comedian with a workingman's sensibility, Leno has felt the winds of change, and they're blowing in Jimmy Fallon, who has long recalled the smart-Alec kid in class who always tried to be funny but you thought wasn't . . . but grew on you.  

Leno has decided that Fallon's humor is more in tune with the younger generation of Americans, and so he's stepping down for good now.  As for Fallon . . . well, I tried watching him in a movie for five minutes, and that was all I could take.   Some folks who remember him from "Saturday Night Live" remember having trouble watching him for five seconds.  But as a talk show host on "Late Night," he's shown himself to be rather clever, from imagining how the lyrics of the Beatles' "Yesterday" would have gone had Paul McCartney kept the working title "Scrambled Eggs" and coming up with a song about tasty food (which he sang with Sir Paul himself!) to working out in drag with Michelle Obama.  Now I find his humor inexplicably intriguing, and I no longer see him as someone who deserves to be bitch-slapped (in at least one movie, I believe he was).  But can he translate his late-night humor into something for an earlier hour? We shall see. 

Fallon is broadcasting "The Tonight Show" from New York, bringing it back to the Big Apple after 42 years.