The late-night talk show monologue is a weird convention: it's stilted, it's very rarely funny, and it's so old fashioned you can practically see the dust on the jokes as they tumble out of the host's mouth and land on the floor with a thud.
All of this holds especially true for Jay Leno's monologues on The Tonight Show–which probably works, because the only people who watch Leno are septugenarians trying to communicate with the ghost of Johnny Carson through their rabbit-eared televisions, and those people are covered in a thin layer of dust themselves, anyway.
Still, last night's Tonight Show monologue was actually slightly funny–a low, ground-skimming level of praise that The Tonight Show hasn't even attempted to earn in years–and all it took was a team of animators, Homer Simpson, and the slashing of Jay Leno's role to practically nothing.