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!

 

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