"Headlines" is a segment that airs weekly on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It also aired on the prime-time spin-off The Jay Leno Show. The segment usually airs on Monday, though it airs on Tuesday usually after some popular weekend event pre-empted it for Monday night. It was first seen in 1987, when Jay Leno was still a guest host on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Viewers submit newspaper headlines from all over the world, and the headlines usually contain a misspelled word or badly structured sentences that comically (and often in an unintentionally risqué way) completely change the meaning of what the writer is trying to say.
Since the early 1980s, David Letterman has been doing a similar segment called "Small Town News" (albeit on and off) on Late Night with David Letterman and Late Show with David Letterman. Conan O'Brien parodied "Headlines" on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in a segment called Actual Items, which uses advertisements purposefully doctored by the show's prop and writing staffs.
On December 18, 2006, both Letterman and Leno included in their segments an item in The Dallas Morning News about Letterman, which included a photograph of Leno.[1]
In January 2010 during the replacement of O'Brien as Tonight Show host, Letterman ran a fake promo (featuring former Tonight announcer Edd Hall) for the return of Leno to The Tonight Show, referring to "Headlines" as "the bit [Leno] stole from Letterman's late-night show".[2]
Leno released several compilations of Headlines during the late 1980s and early 1990s:
Wil B. Strange includes "personal ads from the book 'Jay Leno's Headlines'" in an issue of Campus Life.[3]
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