Don’t be left out of Lopez’s nightly party on TBS
Jeff Simon
Published: January 08, 2010
-Buffalo News

He comes out bouncing on invisible springs, like a lowrider arrogantly stopping traffic on the streets of some New Mexico/ Mexico border town. He jukes and jives with the handheld cameras, as they all quickly weave through the audience. He high-fives audience members, low-fives them and hugs a few comely female ones. With all that flesh-pressing, though, that doesn’t mean he’s looking into their eyes.

He ends up giving his bandleader Michael Bearden an Obama fist bump.

Finally, he’s ready to bounce and dance out to center stage, after bobbing and weaving as much as Muhammad Ali in his young prime (the big difference is that he’s neither throwing nor ducking punches).

Not even his model, Arsenio Hall, put on a show as high energy as George Lopez does at the beginning of every “George Lopez Tonight” on TBS Monday through Thursday.

Nor is he finished. You then get the pleasure of seeing him deliver his opening monologue.

It’s true that it’s invariably cruder and ruder than his fellow honchos in the late-night talk game (Letterman, O’Brien, Stewart, Colbert, Fallon, Ferguson), but, on a good night, it’s got more physical energy than the rest of them combined. He has a full arsenal of class-clown faces that he’s ready to employ at will. And, just in case things come across as too sedate for, say, a minute or so, the director in the booth will switch rapidly from one hand-held camera to another, just so you never forget that George Lopez is a man in action. He is one vato who is going places.

And his opening monologues, on some nights, are so full of Spanish words and Mexican slang that they’re almost bilingual. If I hadn’t taken four years of high school Spanish, I’d be in trouble watching some of Lopez’s monologues. As it is, I’m guessing that the way he teasingly uses the word “cochina” with some lovely audience members (and the way they respond) is his way of saying they’re the equivalent of “nasty girls.”

None of this is acceptable behavior by most talk show standards, but that’s Lopez’s whole point. As America’s first Latino late-night talk show host, he has absolutely no intention of fading into the middle- American woodwork.

Other late-night hosts—including Wanda Sykes on Saturday nights—might pretend they’re throwing a party. But Lopez is the only one by far who sometimes actually seems to be. His whole act is that he’s just an overgrown kid who is getting away with something every night. And he’s going to share his ethnic pride and his triumph with you back in the clubhouse as long as you know the secret password.

He’s having a fine old time. He acts like a man who has just sneaked over the fence into Lou Dobbs’ yard and stolen all the good plums from Dobbs’ plum tree.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m getting as big a kick out of the first half-hour of Lopez every night as I did when I first caught on to what Craig Ferguson was doing so splendidly after Letterman.

Arsenio Hall, to be sure, was Lopez’s precedent. As America’s first black late-night host, Hall wasn’t about to blend in sedately with the brickwork, either. So Hall imported the “woofing” of the “Dog Pound” at Cleveland Browns games to his audience to kick up the energy of his openings.

Still, it’s nothing like Lopez. Leno’s flesh-pressings at the beginning of his show are tinged with duty and fatal dweebiness compared with all of Lopez’s cool dude prancing and joker posturing.

And you can bet that’s deliberate. Lopez has had more than a few nasty things to say about Leno in the past.

Lopez is also anything but the overgrown mischievous kid he pretends to be. He’s the survivor of a very tough life—early life parental abandonment (his father right away, both parents by the age of 10), his wife donating one of her own kidneys to him just to keep him alive, the maintenance of a truly significant amount of charity work. If ever there was a late-night “vato” (i. e. guy, dude) intimately acquainted with everything about life that isn’t the slightest bit funny, it’s George Lopez.

And, yes, he really is something a little new in TV’s talk landscape. Sykes, really, hasn’t turned out to be all that original or even interesting, except for her guests (it’s hard to dislike a woman who can provide a guest chair for both satirical joke machine Andy Borowitz and porn star Jenna Jameson).

One of America’s media troubles these days—in my opinion—is that what’s new isn’t always scored accurately. No one, for instance, has yet given the TMZ television show credit, for instance, for the novelty of its formal presentation— for its way of getting its quick gossip hits and cheap shots in by showing its morning pitch meeting and then having a screamingly sarcastic narrator sliming every morsel of embarrassing videotape it shows.

It’s one heck of an original TV show formally, whatever you might think about its—oh you know— content (which is, of course, dedicated to the proposition that all the nasty and uncool kids have the right to know everything about the cool kids and say anything they want about it over the lunch table, no matter how misperceived or inaccurate).

Lopez, though, is doing something else. His message to Latinos—and everyone else— is: We’re here. Finally. Time to celebrate, whether Lou Dobbs likes it or not.