The Many Lives of the Late-Night Monologue

When a Trump spokesperson insulted Jimmy Kimmel Live! guest host Tiffany Haddish after she delivered a monologue on the show last month, the comedian celebrated.  

“The White House is mad at me, y’all!” she exclaimed that night. “This is the day that I finally become Jimmy Kimmel.”

Haddish’s victory lap is the latest evidence that the late-night monologue is more of a cultural lightning rod than ever. Witness the firestorms over Kimmel’s own monologue-triggered suspension and Bill Maher’s Real Time opening bits that infuriate the left or the right, depending on the week. 

From Tonight Starring Steve Allen to Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney, the monologue has been a late-night constant for more than 70 years. But the talk-show staple is far from static. The jokey open has shapeshifted over several distinct eras, each reflecting the times in which the punchlines were delivered. 

LateNighter spoke with several late-night monologue writers about how our nation’s nightly ritual has evolved over the past fifty-plus years.

Those observations are supported by an informal quantitative analysis of the time late-night shows devote to monologues, using representative episodes from streaming services, online archives, and social media.

The Only Game in Town (1962-1982) 

Johnny Carson didn’t invent the late-night monologue—that accidental discovery is credited to Steve Allen—but the King of Late Night made it an institution

Carson “was a 30-year boarder in our bedrooms, crooning monologue lullabies to make love by,” wrote Raymond Siller, one-time head writer of The Tonight Show. 

Carson’s monologue lullabies dominated and defined late night during the first two decades of his Tonight Show run. 

Les Crane, Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, and Dick Cavett all attempted to challenge Carson’s late-night dominance, but no one stood a chance against his signature monologue, an early example of appointment television.  

The Carson era, according to Conan writer Berkley Johnson, represented “the golden age of monologue writing.”

Carson perfected the art of mining the day’s headlines for topical gags. “Since I do the show every day, I like to talk about things that are going on in the news, the political situation, whatever is happening,” Carson told Larry Wilde in Great Comedians Talk About Comedy.

Carson’s monologue was disaster-proof, as he established a reputation for hilarity even when his jokes bombed. He was the master “when a joke didn’t work—his acknowledging of it, his embracing of it, talking about the writers,” notes comedy historian and former Late Night with Jimmy Fallon head writer Wayne Federman. “It was just a state-of-the-art job.”

For many, Carson’s opening jokes were the last thing they heard before falling asleep. “A lot of people would tune in just for that monologue,” notes Federman. 

Carson made those eight minutes worth viewers’ while. Like The Daily Show would for later generations, his monologue told audiences what cultural news was worth knowing.

“Being out there every night,” Carson told Rolling Stone in 1979, “it’s the only show that I know of on television where anybody is commenting on what’s going on in the country every single day.”

Carson’s Rules (1982-1992)

Carson governed late night as the 1980s began, thanks to an NBC contract that gave him veto power over his network’s post-primetime schedule. 

And when NBC wanted to develop a second comedy/talk program to follow The Tonight Show, Carson’s permission came with stipulations. 

The new kid, David Letterman, wasn’t allowed a full orchestra. He couldn’t book guests who regularly appeared on The Tonight Show.

And most importantly, Letterman wasn’t allowed to perform a full monologue.

At Late Night with David Letterman, the writing staff didn’t even refer to it as a monologue. Instead, Letterman delivered “opening remarks,” a segment that averaged just over three minutes in length throughout the decade. That was less than half as long as Carson’s trademark open.  

Unlike Carson, whose show turned on the monologue, Letterman made his name on produced bits—Viewer Mail, Stupid Pet Tricks, and his signature video remotes.

Of course, Carson couldn’t impose his rules on everyone. In 1989, Arsenio Hall launched his syndicated late-night talk show, leaning into an energetic monologue punctuated by his audience’s trademark barking and fist-pumping that drew in young viewers.

Like Carson, Hall emphasized jokes in an opening segment that averaged more than eight minutes a night. While Hall’s total audience was smaller than Carson’s, his popularity in the younger demo brought in big advertising dollars and signaled that younger viewers were ready for an alternative to Carson.

The Monologue Wars (1993-2002)

After Carson retired in 1992, late night saw its first true battle for supremacy when David Letterman decamped to CBS after being passed over for The Tonight Show job by Jay Leno. 

The competition was nowhere more evident than in the monologue. No longer bound by his agreement with Carson, Letterman began devoting substantially more time to his opening jokes even before wrapping up his NBC run—a shift Leno quickly recognized.

At Late Show, Letterman’s monologue ended up averaging more than twice as long as it had on Late Night.

Letterman “had never committed to it before,”  Peter Lassally recalled of the shift in Bill Carter’s The Late Shift. “Now he would just do a joke, stand there, and receive the laugh with a big, warm grin on his face.”

Leno doubled down in response, adding even more jokes, stretching his monologue to eleven to twelve minutes a night. Leno’s jokes strategically ran “past Letterman's first commercial,” Tonight Show with Jay Leno writer Marvin Silbermintz told LateNighter, giving wandering channel-surfers a chance to sample his comedy.

Leno believed the monologue was his superpower, and represented his best chance to beat Letterman, says Jon Rineman, who began submitting jokes to Leno’s show by fax before becoming a lead monologue writer for Jimmy Fallon. 

Leno was tireless, staying up late writing the next day’s monologue gags after each night’s  Tonight Show taping. His workday was more of the same, sifting through an estimated 500 jokes a day to find the perfect mix. 

While Leno and Letterman jockeyed for number one, they weren’t alone in the late-night landscape. Conan O’Brien took over NBC’s Late Night, and the network hosts’ monologues competed with cable and syndicated upstarts like Jon Stewart, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Bill Maher, and Dennis Miller. 

Monologue writers in that post-Carson era faced a new challenge, Late Night with Conan O’Brien writer Brian Kiley told LateNighter: Too many shows mining the same topics for laughs. 

Letterman and Leno, whose shows aired an hour before Conan, got first crack at topical jokes. “We might have written a joke earlier in the day than they did,” Kiley said, “but they got to have it on the air earlier.”

Sometimes, the jokes collided. Kiley recalls O’Brien, Leno and Letterman all telling the same joke on Madonna’s birthday: “What do you get the woman who's had everyone?” 

“That's the kind of thing that would happen,” Kiley said. “We were all working off the same premises.”

The Digital Shift (2003-2015)

Those premises were found in “all newspapers at the beginning,” Silbermintz remembers of his Leno days. As the 1990s progressed, a Tonight Show staffer would be assigned the task of  summarizing fresh material from the still-developing Internet.  

Reviewing jokes was also “very analog,” remembers Johnson.  During his Late Night tenure, Conan O’Brien would receive a printout of jokes, making “a check mark by jokes he liked, a squiggle by jokes where there was something there, but he wasn't sure about it.” 

While Conan’s early review process was decidedly old-school, late night ultimately went digital, and monologues were changed for good. 

“Twitter changed everything because now the whole world's writing jokes,” says Kiley. “That made it very difficult because you'd write a joke at 9 a.m. and then at 3 o'clock, some random person would tweet the same joke.” 

Viewers in Carson’s era tuned in for topical jokes, but in the 21st century, “you're getting that somewhere else,” says Johnson.

Even everyday obscurities weren’t safe for joke writers. “I just was watching an Instagram reel about some dumb thing, like a woman locked the pizza delivery guy in her house for movie night,” says Johnson. “And there's 50 bloggers that were all jumping on the same story and giving their little take on it.”

With late-night competing in a digital world, some hosts shifted from a monologue emphasis to comedy that was harder to replicate. 

“For a while there, late night shows got very gamified,” says Johnson. 

Think Jimmy Fallon’s "Lip Sync Battle," James Corden’s "Carpool Karaoke," or Jimmy Kimmel’s YouTube pranks—if the Internet was coming for late night, why couldn’t late-night create material that went viral?

At Fallon’s Late Night, writers took to “playing to Jimmy's strengths,” recalls Rineman. While Leno expanded the monologue, Fallon cut the segment in half in favor of produced comedy bits like “Wheel of Musical Impressions,” “#Hashtags,” and “Slow Jam the News.”

Fallon’s monologue expanded once he took over The Tonight Show, but it never approached the length of Leno’s.

Deemphasizing the monologue worked, at least in the short term. Early on in his Tonight Show tenure, Fallon’s ratings consistently topped those for Late Show with David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Not Politics as Usual (2016-2025)

The 2016 election reversed that trend, putting lengthy political monologues back at the center of the late-night ratings race.

“I remember Fallon had been number one. And then the night of Trump's inauguration, like that, it switched over to Colbert being number one,” remembers Rineman. “There was a new president, and people wanted to hear what Stephen had to say.”

Colbert’s pointed monologues represented a shift from earlier eras when late-night comics opted for broader, less personal punchlines. 

Carson set the tone. “I’m an entertainer, not a commentator,” he told Playboy in 1967 about political material. “If you’re a comedian, your job is to make people laugh.”

Leno and Letterman were similarly determined not to alienate half their audience.  “We didn't care about our own political feelings,” Silbermintz said of Leno’s Tonight Show tenure. 

On earlier late-night shows, including Saturday Night Live, politicians were cartoons, identified by comic stereotypes rather than ideology. “We made caricatures out of the president,” says Conan writer Kiley. “Bill Clinton was the horn dog and George W. Bush was dumb. You could write those jokes all day.”

But The Daily Show’s pointed satire set things in a new direction. “They did an incredible job,” says Late Night with Conan O’Brien’s Johnson. “Even though it was not a late night show in the sense of Letterman or Leno, it was still in that same rough time slot, still beating the shit out of us at the Emmys every year.”

“We didn’t live in Carson's world anymore,” recalls Federman. “We lived more in a Jon Stewart world.”

“Stewart was so successful and so good at it,” says Kiley. “He was very influential. Colbert took over the mantle from Stewart and had that built-in left-wing audience.”

The more Colbert leaned into political monologues, the more his Late Show thrived. In his early episodes prior to the 2016 election, his monologue segment averaged just under six minutes. After Trump became President, Colbert supersized his nightly political critique to roughly 11 minutes a night, approaching Leno-era length. Top ratings followed. 

Late night was experiencing a version of the audience fragmentation seen in cable news. Shows with clearly defined political identities—including Gutfeld! on the right and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on the left—built loyal audiences, while Fallon’s more politically mixed approach struggled to maintain its earlier ratings lead.

In a partisan late-night world, topicality became more important than ever. “When we started losing to Colbert, I started paying attention to what Colbert was doing,” says Rineman.  “I found out that Stephen, when there was breaking news during taping, would actually go [back] over to his monologue mark and film three or four jokes about that breaking story. And then they would edit it into the monologue.”

Rineman brought a similar idea to a Tonight Show showrunner. “The response I got was, ‘That's bleeping crazy,’” he said. “And that's when I knew that we weren't going to win against Colbert.”

Back to the Future (2026-Present)

But politically charged monologues have other consequences, as Kimmel and Colbert discovered this past year. Though CBS has insisted that politics played no role in Colbert’s cancellation, many viewers and commentators remain skeptical. And no comedian is showing up to replace him, at least not in a traditional late-night capacity. 

The old boundaries of late night are beginning to break down.

“Late night has morphed into something else,” observes Federman. “It's a different universe from David Letterman or Jay Leno or Conan. That's how far we are down this road.”

The monologue, however, has proved unusually adaptable. Even as traditional late-night viewership declines, the format continues to thrive on social media and other online platforms. A Kimmel monologue on YouTube can garner 5 million-plus views.

As Kimmel recently told Vulture, “There are far more people watching late-night TV than there ever were, if you look at the number of views me and my colleagues get online every day and add in our linear-television ratings.” 

The monologue is disproportionately responsible for those numbers, drawing far more views on average than sketches, desk bits, or celebrity interviews. 

It may be “an old-fashioned art form,” concedes Johnson, but the numbers prove that when it comes to late-night TV, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

“Certain people come along throughout the years and try to downplay the importance of the monologue,” says Rineman. “But the monologue is always going to be important. It's just cathartic for a lot of people.”

Get stories like this in your inbox: Sign up for LateNighter’s free daily newsletter.