Cleveland comic Rob O'Reilly desperately needs your vote. Too bad the folks at
The Tonight Show are giving you a tough time casting it.
On Friday night's show, Leno rolled clips of 10 contestants in contention to become a "Tonight Show Correspondent." The winner scores an on-camera job as the show's freelance interviewer at events like the Republican National Convention, Olympic Games, and the Academy Awards.
Check out O'Reilly and his nine competitors, and see if you can pick out what's wrong:
For starters, the 30-second clip that identifies O'Reilly isn't really O'Reilly at all. Even he doesn't know who the dude from New York is. Scroll down two rows, and there's Brad "Woody" Wollack from L.A. Only that's not Woody. That's O'Reilly. And up until this morning, there wasn't even a function to vote for him. "Literally, I was the only one who didn't have a little thing to vote below me," says O'Reilly, who's in New York this week to make the comedy-club rounds. "So everyone has gotten a head start over me."
Well, we're here to help.
O'Reilly's 30-second audition tape is an edited version of a five-minute series of street interviews he conducted in September on the Boston University campus, where he graduated last year with a degree in television comedy-writing. In each interview, he poses a multiple-choice question, like "When was the Chinese Exclusion Act enacted?" He then gives his targets three choices: the 19th century, the 1800s, or the Gilded Age. Of course, everyone gets it right, because all three answers mean the same thing. The interviews can be seen in their entirety on
O'Reilly's website.
O'Reilly is now counting on you to vote for him since he thinks the odds are stacked against him. In addition to being misidentified on the Tonight Show website, he managed to miss Friday night's airing of his tape. Standing outside a New York bar with his girlfriend to watch the show, a bouncer told them that the club was too packed to let them in. They raced back to his apartment, only to arrive one minute after the closing credits. "I have heard it over a speaker phone, though," says O'Reilly. "On the positive side, I was one of 10 people chosen over thousands to compete. If I win, it would be life-changing, to say the least."
-- Cris Glaser
