DriveHead Launches Windows 95

LaunchTime Humor with Jay and Bill

I confess: I dashed out of the Bill and Jay show before the end, because I had to file a story from Building 12: The Press Room. This meant that I missed about 18 minutes of the show (puts one in mind of Nixon’s tapes). However, I caught some of it, and some of what I caught was pretty funny. So for those who didn't see it all on TV (or live), here’s a smattering of Jay Leno's jokes from Launch 95....

  • Pointing to an Altair he claimed Bill Gates had lent him, he claimed it had "worse memory than Rosa Lopez"
  • NBC: Now Bill-Compatible
  • Windows 95: "So powerful it can keep track of all of OJ's alibis at once"
  • Describing joke mail on the Internet, he claimed that you can send "pretend messages" claiming to be from Bill Clinton or Bill Gates or whoever. "So you can pretend to be the most powerful man in the free world...or even Clinton"
  • The VCR in Bill Gates' house "is still flashing 12"
  • As a result of "..that silly little mixup with the Justice Department" Leno joshed that Gates had called him in to help. In Washington D.C., he had a hard time, until he described "the ability to delete files. Then all the Whitewater people and senators..."
  • "Ladies and gentlemen...Bill Gates, and the Bill Gates Dancers!"
  • Humor from Gates! "So easy, even a talk show host can get it"
  • In the Start menu's Files option was an AVI file entitled "The first time I used Windows 95"...when Leno clicked on it, a movie played of him running out onto the roof of NBC lip-synching to The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music..."Before Windows 95, I could not sing a note!"
  • In response to the right-click capabilities..."People have been paying for this right mouse button for years..."
  • Running gag about jokes Bill wrote, including "the two modems in a bar..."
  • "Simple and painless, ladies and gentlemen! Sounds like laser haemorrhoid surgery"
  • "You're mighty cocky for a guy worth only $13 billion"
  • To test the "member of the audience" simplicity of installing whatever under Windows 95, they called up two members of the audience. For no apparent reason, they picked a man who was wearing a vest made of old beta CD-ROMs. "Lovely outfit," said Leno "Are you single?"
  • Unintentional humor from Gates: Windows 95 described as "unlocking the potential of computing" and bringing it to "a whole new level"...without even a trace of irony!

    [Note to potential flamers: I really, genuinely do like Windows 95, and have used it since early beta releases in June 1994. It’s a fine end-user operating system that I’d recommend to anyone with time to learn a new operating system and a system meeting or exceeding a 486/66 processor with 16MB. But it’s only an operating system...]


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