As Jay Leno hangs up his "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" hat, I thought I would post this story which I wrote for the Winter, 1994-95 Emerson College Alumni Magazine. I was the magazine's editor for four years when I served Emerson as its Director of College Communications.
For Jay Leno, ’73, Being Funny Has Always Been A Serious
Business
By
Burt Peretsky
While at Emerson College and during his
internship at the Showbiz School of Hard Knocks, Jay Leno learned that the
business of comedy is serious. Apparently, he’s learned it well, as today he
holds what many consider the top job in network television.
AUTUMN, 1954
Las Vegas.
Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s fabulous
Flamingo, the largest and most luxurious hotel and casino in the world, has been
joined on the “Strip” by the Desert Inn, the Last Frontier, the Sahara, and the
Sands. The Riviera is rising nearby from the desert dust.
New York City.
Two young singers -- he’s Steve
Lawrence, and she’s Eydie Gorme -- get their first big break on the new medium
of television. They sing a duet on the
inaugural season of The Tonight Show hosted by comedian-musician Steve Allen.
New Rochelle, NY.
As is often the case, hard-working
insurance salesman Angelo J. Leno is home late from work, but Catherine has
held dinner for him and for their kids, four-year-old James Douglas Muir Leno
and his 14-year-old brother Patrick.
In Vegas, a crooner named Sinatra, a
piano player named Liberace, and a movie actor named Reagan have all appeared
by now in the popular new showrooms of what is to become the “Entertainment
Capital of the World.” On national television from New York, Steve and Eydie’s singing
is a bit rough, and the audio of early live TV doesn’t do them much justice.
But you can tell this couple has promise. In New Rochelle, Angelo Leno is
accustomed to late dinners. He’s put in many hours selling insurance policies;
he’s driven a truck; he’s worked as an auto mechanic. His philosophy of hard
work is making an impression on the kids.
AUTUMN, 1994
Las Vegas.
In the largest and most luxurious hotel
and casino in the world, the new MGM Grand, Steve and Eydie are sitting on Jay
Leno’s couch on what The Tonight Show staff calls “Guest Row.” The singers are
showroom headliners at the Sheraton Desert Inn, and The Tonight Show is playing
the fabled Las Vegas Strip for the first full week in its own fabled history.
As always, admission to The Tonight Show
is free, but the 650 people crowding the MGM’s Hollywood Theatre to its
capacity are holding what the Las Vegas Sun is calling “the hottest tickets in
town.” About 450 of them are casino high rollers, Tonight Show guests, and NBC
officials. The other 200 were selected in a raffle from an incredible 50,000 entries.
In typical Las Vegas fashion, long-shot odds lead to a jackpot for only a lucky
few.
Steve, Eydie, and Jay are laughing at the
1954 Tonight Show clip. All three are stars today, stars of the first
magnitude. On The Tonight Show With Jay Leno this week, stars abound. “Mr. Las
Vegas,” Wayne Newton, is there, of course. So is Roseanne. Robert Urich of
Vegas fame makes a sham “Dan Tanner” arrest of MGM’s Dorothy, the Tin Man, the
Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow. Luther Vandross, Miss America Heather
Whitestone, Rip Taylor, Charlie Sheen, Brett Butler, George Wallace, and Vince
Gill are some of the others on Guest Row this week.
The ratings are going through the roof.
For the first night of the week-long engagement from Vegas, The Tonight Show overnights in New
York City are nearly double those of Letterman’s show. Nationally, Leno’s
beating Letterman handily for the entire week, marking the first Tonight Show
victory since the two new hosts have been opposite each other. Jay Leno’s decision -- and it was his idea --
to go on the road, to do the show from Las Vegas for an entire week, is making
this a pivotal five nights for his network and for Leno, personally. The energy
that is Las Vegas has been captured on The Tonight Show; Jay knows it; the
viewers know it; and the visiting execs from the network -- the suits -- know
it.
There’s Leno... teasing Roseanne about
her new boyfriend. Here’s Iron Jay... mugging about weightlifting with Wayne
Newton. There’s Elvis Leno... visiting the old hangouts and looking at some new
Elvis landmarks like the Graceland Chapel and the cheap motel sporting the
marquis, “Elvis Slept Here.” Says Elvis Leno is his best Memphis drawl, “I
don’t think so!”
In the early 1970s in Boston, Emerson
College student Jay Leno wasn’t concerned with television, Las Vegas, The
Tonight Show, or stars like Steve and Eydie. His passion in life was getting
“stage time.”
“You know, I was a comedian, and it was
sort of frustrating. You know, you go out and do a club on weekends, then you’d
have to fly home to go to school Monday morning. That was always rather odd.”
While he may have been distracted at
college, Leno has obviously come to value an Emerson education in the years
since he was there.
To use his word, he “loves” Emerson
kids. “All of our interns are from Emerson,” he said exaggerating just a bit,
but only a bit. In the last academic year, for instance, a half-dozen Emerson
students enrolled at the school’s Los Angeles Center won Tonight Show
internships; two Emerson interns are working on the show in this fall semester.
Leno’s own “internship” in show business
was at the School of Hard Knocks. “I was working all the time. I would finish
class at Emerson on a Friday, and then I’d fly to Kansas City to do the Playboy
Club for 400 bucks, and my ticket was $450 to get there. So I had to work
during the week at the car place to get enough money to fly and do the gig.”
The “car place” was Boston’s Foreign
Motors near Emerson on Commonwealth Avenue, and how Jay got the job there was
typical of his early determination to succeed.
Says New York Times TV reporter Bill Carter in his book The Late Shift,
Leno “needed a regular source of income, so he went to a Rolls Royce/Mercedes
dealership in Boston and asked for a job as a car washer. The owner said no. As
Jay related it, he simply turned up for work the next day, put on overalls, and
started washing cars. When the other guys on the job took notice of him, Leno
told them he was the new wash guy, and they all went on happily for a few days.
Finally, the owner noticed him working and asked what he thought he was doing.
Jay told him he thought he’d just do a good job for awhile without getting
paid, and maybe if the owner liked him he might eventually get hired. Of
course, the owner caved in and hired him that day.”
At Foreign Motors, Leno says, he worked
at “new car prep, lubrication, maintenance,” and adds, “But the nice thing
about working at a Mercedes place was that most of the mechanics, most of the
guys who worked there, really didn’t have much of an education. And being the
comedian, the talker, and the college kid, I was always the one who would get
to drive Mrs. So-And-So home or talk to the customer. So, it was a good way to
meet rich people and a pretty easy job.”
Leno has no problem any more meeting
rich or famous people. As host of NBC’s The Tonight Show since May 25, 1992, he
holds court over the most desirable venue in show business. If you’re in
showbiz and haven’t “done” The Tonight Show, your career hasn’t taken off, or
it’s sputtering. If you’re in politics, or network journalism, or if you’ve
written a book, the break you want is a shot with Leno.
Look at the guests Leno has welcomed in
recent months from the entertainment world. In alphabetical deference, they
include: Michael Bolton, Garth Brooks, Cirque du Soleil, Crash Test Dummies,
Cindy Crawford, Robert DeNiro, Celine Dion, Tom Hanks, Rush Limbaugh, Eddie
Murphy, Keanu Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger (he’ll be back!), Howard Stern, and
James Taylor. Sports figures such as Troy Aikman, Charles Barkley, Barry Bonds,
Tommy Lasorda, and Pat Riley have appeared, as have such “civilians” as the oldest
working man, 108-year-old Sydney Amber.
The political crowd has checked into
Guest Row, as well, including such notables as former President Jimmy Carter,
Henry Kissinger, New York Governor Mario Cuomo and Texas Governor Ann Richards,
Sen. Bob Dole, and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf.
Leno’s trademark is his topical opening
monologue, and his jokes often make the papers the following morning or are
quoted on radio and on television newscasts. This year, Washingtonian magazine named Leno the country’s best political
humorist.
While professing that he’s “no expert”
on the subject, Jay expounds at length about political humor: “The trick to
doing political humor is knowing what everybody else knows.
“Sometimes when I watch comedians do
political humor, the mistake a lot of them make is that they simply try to
impress the audience with how much they know. Or they’ll throw out an obscure
senator or some reference that too few other people get.
“If you pick up your local newspaper,
if you pick up USA Today, and you watch your local news, and if the same story
is in all three, you have something. My attitude is that if I know about it, I
assume most people probably know about it.”
But, Leno claims, “I’m not really a
political humorist. To me, they’re just jokes that happen to be political.”
Doth he protest too much? Leno says
he’s accustomed to being attacked as having a political point of view and using
his jokes as a partisan. “I can’t make fun of Dole and Clinton,” he counters.
“I don’t think anybody can figure out my political bent. One week, it seems
extremely Democratic, and the next week it might seem extremely Republican, depending
on what’s happening. When Bush was in, I would get these letters, ‘Oh, you and
your Democratic friends! You’re ruining a fine man.’ Now, I get letters, ‘Oh,
you and your Republican buddies! You’re bringing down a good man.’
“I had a comedian on the show once, and
his opening line was, ‘I’m a liberal Democrat.’ Well, right there, he lost half
the audience. It’s just a matter of telegraphing the audience. Suddenly, any
joke you do then about Bush or Dole is not just a joke anymore. It’s, ‘Oh, I
see, he’s just trying to get a dig in.’”
“Just tell your jokes,” the master
advises. “The audience will figure out where you’re going. Lead them down the
path, and then go after them!”
During the five shows in Las Vegas,
Leno plays down the political humor. “Political stuff doesn’t work very well in
Vegas,” he says, “because people didn’t read the paper today or yesterday or
the day before. They read it last week or a month ago.”
The few political zingers he did throw
out from the MGM stage were, he points out, “just to give some sense of
balance.” As the late US House Speaker “Tip” O’Neill said of politics, Leno
says, “All comedy is local. If people watch at home, and these 600 people don’t
laugh, they go, ‘Gee, he really did poorly.’ But if there are people laughing
in the studio audience, the people at home go, ‘He did really great!’ They
really judge you not on what they think it is, but on what they see other
people think it is. It’s not a laugh track. It’s real. But, laugh tracks are
there for a reason.”
Leno is, as the foregoing would
indicate, a true student of the craft of comedy. He ought to be. He’s served
his internship, his apprenticeship, his time waiting in the wings, his five
years as “exclusive guest host” of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and
his time on as many as 300 stages a year for the past 20 years.
Ed Hellenbrand has known Leno for most
of those 20 years, first as a comedy club owner in Chicago and more recently as
a booker of comedy acts. “Leno’s the hardest working comic in the business,”
Hellenbrand says. “He always has been.”
In the book The Late Shift, writer Bill Carter comes to praise Leno as “a
gentle, decent guy” who demonstrates, despite the odds against him, “his
resiliency and his indefatigable willingness to keep on going forward.” In the
book, Carter tells the story of Leno getting The Tonight Show, and David
Letterman defecting to CBS for his Late Show spot opposite Leno.
Letterman started strong in the
ratings, stronger than Leno was doing.
“For Jay Leno,” Carter writes, “it was
back to the familiar struggle to prove himself. He had seen David Letterman
pass him twice -- first when Dave zoomed past him in the comedy clubs to rapid
television stardom, a move that Jay trumped by leapfrogging Dave to get The
Tonight Show; and then when Dave , with no tradition of late night at his
network and a far weaker lineup of stations, cruised on by to take the leadership
in late night away from Jay.
“A gentle, decent guy, though a far
more complicated person than ever came across on television, Leno responded the
only way he knew how: he worked harder. Jay worked his phones again to the
press, the advertisers, and the NBC affiliates. He reminded them all that no
matter what Dave was doing, Jay was still doing well.
“And he was. His ratings were off, but
not drastically. The makeup of his audience had gotten older, but there were
still enough advertisers buying time to ensure NBC would have a business.”
-----
Leno’s denim shirt and jeans contrasted
with the plush surroundings of his dressing room at the MGM Grand. He had just
finished a hugely successful show with Wayne Newton, Charlie Sheen, and George
Wallace. Leno’s wife Mavis, a former comedy writer who met Jay on one of his
many New York club dates, sat patiently on a love seat, while Jay finished his
last chore of the day, an interview for his Emerson College alumni magazine.
He’s animated, belying the fact that
he’s into his 12th hour of the workday. “I enjoy the fame,” he tells the
interviewer. “I have a great time. I have no complaints.”
Leno, like many comedians, got his
first big break on The Tonight Show, making his first appearance on March 2,
1977. “The Tonight Show was my first show that really counted,” he notes. “I
don’t want to say Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas didn’t count. But they just
didn’t have the impact. If you’re on Merv Griffin or on Mike Douglas, The Tonight
Show would say, ‘Yeh, let’s take a look at him. He’s been on a couple of shows.
Oh, he’s pretty good.’ The Tonight Show is always the signature show.”
“I’ve
had over 90 comics on since I started the show. There’s a few George Carlins in
there, but I would say there’s 30-40 brand new people in there that nobody ever
heard of.”
What advice would Jay Leno offer the
Emerson student who wants to make it as a comedian? The answer speaks volumes
about Leno’s own rise to fame: “Probably the best advice is to obviously try to
get enough stage time as you can, no matter what kind. I mean, I always tell
kids who are just starting out that the best thing you can do is to try and
emcee as much as you can. Whenever you’re talking in front of people, that’s good.
“Putting together the first five
minutes of your act is the hardest part. Because everything else is just a
matter of adding three or four seconds a week until by the end of the year you
have 25 minutes or a half an hour. What I used to do in Boston was -- at that time
it was coffeehouses and stuff like that... the basic premise is the same -- try
to emcee shows. Emcee anything you can. Get up there. Tell a few jokes. As long
as you’re getting laughs, keep talking. As soon as you bomb, you go, ‘okay,
let’s bring on so and so...’
You know what I mean? Just try to keep
the ball rolling. Like spinning plates. There used to be all kinds of places,
all these nameless coffee houses. When I was there, it wasn’t really comedy
clubs. It was mostly, sort of like what’s happening now in LA ... people reading
poetry and stuff like that. Coffee shops. Passim in Harvard Square -- is that
still around? That was a great place too. Everybody used to work there. Robert
Klein. Richard Lewis. Oh man, that was a fun place to go.
“The real trick, I guess, to getting
into showbiz is not to make $30-40,000 a year doing something else. I had so
many friends who got out of school and got some kind of job. And they buy a
car, and they buy a stereo. And then I say, ‘Hey, you know, there’s an open
audition in New York tomorrow.’ ‘I can’t go,’ they tell me, ‘I gotta work.’ Whaddya doing? Are you working to pay for the
stupid car or the stereo, or do you just want to roll the dice and take a
chance? I mean, so many people would say, ‘I sell mutual funds now, live in
Connecticut, and I’d like to be a comedian.’ Sell the house in Connecticut! Run
to Stand Up, New York, run to the Comedy Center, run to the different clubs and
try to get on at 7:30, 9 o’clock, 10:15, if you can. That’s what we used to do.
“And try to get as much stage time as
you can, ’cause almost every ad-lib you ever think up, you’ll use at some
point. I still throw out an obscure line that I might have said 20 years ago,
only because it’s -- you know -- obviously the circumstances are a little bit different,
but basically the joke is the same. And you really just save everything you do.
If you only do this once a week, and you get on stage, and suddenly -- oop --
there’s a lump in your throat ... and you’re talking differently than you
normally talk ... if you do it every day, pretty soon, there’s no difference
between on stage and off stage. You just talk normally ... and whether there’s
three people or 3000, it’s the same thing.”
-----
Say ‘hi’ for me to Dr. Corea at
Emerson,” Jay asks. Leno took several courses at the College with Humanities
and Social Sciences Prof. Peter Corea, with whom he still stays in touch. “He’s
a nice guy,” Leno adds.
Another “nice guy,” Leno’s father
Angelo, died in August. His mother Catherine had died a few months earlier.
Three days after his dad’s funeral, Jay told his Tonight Show audience that,
“Nobody was brought up righter than I was,” and he promised, “We’ll fight the
good fight, Pop.”
Rest assured, Mr. Leno, your son Jay is
fighting the good fight ... and he’s winning!
#######
