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Authors: Dave Berg
Tags: #Entertainment
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Jay rarely attends Hollywood parties or social events and has few show-business friends. He says he likes making showbiz money but doesn’t like living the life, which he compares to marrying a hooker. He rolled his eyes whenever entertainers whined about how hard they worked and advised them never to do it in public because so many people were struggling just to make ends meet.
He would tell young actors who were overwhelmed by the long hours they had to spend on shoots: “The last thing people want to see is rich people complaining.” And his definition of a rich person was “anyone making more money than you do.”
Jay has close ties with police and firefighters and often does benefits for them. He once told me that everybody—not just kids in the ghetto—had to be in a gang, like it or not. The gang he preferred was made up of cops. Of course, he was kidding. Although, for some odd reason, he rarely gets speeding tickets. And he owns some of the fastest cars on the planet.
Early in his career, Jay had a few run-ins with the law. He was arrested for vagrancy two nights in a row at the same place, right in front of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum on Hollywood Boulevard. He was homeless at the time and had no place to sleep, so he walked all night.
In 2000, when he got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he requested that it be placed on the spot where he was arrested in front of the iconic Hollywood museum. At the ceremony, the late Johnny Grant, Hollywood’s honorary mayor, granted Jay a pardon for his crimes. The police were also there—this time as Jay’s invited guests.
Jay had come a long way since he told his first joke in fourth grade. His teacher was talking about how cruel the Sheriff of Nottingham was to Friar Tuck. And Jay said: “Do you know why they boiled him in oil? Because he was a fryer.” He got laughs right from the get-go.
A number of show business greats influenced Jay, including Johnny Carson, Steve Allen, Jack Benny, and Rodney Dangerfield. But his favorite was Elvis Presley. He would often point out that every single one of Elvis’s thirty-one films made money, despite the fact that critics couldn’t stand them. When Jay was seven years old, he went to the movies and watched Elvis in
Loving You.
The girls swooned when he sang “Teddy Bear.” That’s when Jay decided to get into entertainment. At first he took guitar lessons, but when that didn’t work he turned to jokes.
Jay impersonates Elvis all the time, saying, “Thank you, thank you very much.” He used to do an Elvis bit, sneering and singing Shakespearean soliloquies as the King would have done. In fact, Dick Clark told him that Elvis only liked two impersonations of himself, and Jay’s was one of them.
But no one shaped James Douglas Muir “Jay” Leno and his comedy more than his parents. You could see it in his stand-up routine, which was full of funny stories that illustrated the dichotomy of his father Angelo’s Italian background and his mother Catherine’s Scottish side.
Much of the humor was about food. On Sundays, dinner on the Italian side of the family consisted of more meatballs and spaghetti than anyone could eat. On the Scottish side, the family would go to his aunt’s house; she kept Coca Cola in the cupboard rather than paying to refrigerate it.
Jay described it to Oprah this way: “We’d go from meatballs and lasagna to warm Coke and a stale scone. My poor aunt would pour half a glass of Coke, and it would overflow because it was so hot! When we’d go to the Italian side for dinner, my [Scottish] aunt would say, ‘Look at the waste.’ She’d be counting how many meatballs were left.”
Jay’s parents have both passed on, but they lived long enough to see their son become a successful comedian and
eventually take over
Tonight
. However, they never quite understood it, which was also a rich source of comedy for Jay.
When Jay got the gig, he made the cover of
TIME,
and he called his mom to tell her to pick up a copy. “Now, which one is that?” she asked. “It’s
TIME
magazine, Ma—one of the biggest. . . . Call Aunt Faye in New Jersey and everybody in New York, and tell them I’m on the cover.” There was a long pause, and his mom said, “I don’t think you’d be on the cover there, Jay. They just put you on the cover here in Andover [Massachusetts] because they know you’re from the area.”
Jay credited his mom as the inspiration for the title of his show, which was originally called
The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno.
But his mom, who despised pretentiousness, recoiled at the idea that her son would be the star of anything. So Jay changed the name to
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
He was a C-student, which probably stemmed from his dyslexia and his restlessness. His mom used to tell him he would have to work a little harder than the other kids. He took it to heart, and that’s why he’s a workaholic. No one—not even his harshest critics—would dispute the claim that he is the hardest-working man in show business.
Jay loves to tell the story about a meeting he and his mom had with his high-school guidance counselor, who told him, “Education isn’t for everyone.” He then suggested Jay might want to drop out of school and parlay a part-time job he had at McDonald’s into a career.
The best part of this story is that after that meeting Jay continued to work at McDonald’s, where he won a talent show and decided to go into comedy. He also went on to study at Emerson College in Boston, where he launched his career by writing and performing comedy sketches with his roommate.
But Jay doesn’t resent his counselor for irreparably damaging his sense of self-worth. He thinks today’s emphasis on self-esteem is overrated and often points out that Mafia hit men are more self-confident than anyone else. He really believes everyone else is better and smarter than he is. “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with feeling like you’re not the greatest,” he once said. “Maybe you’re not the best, so you should work a little harder.”
In any competitive situation Jay portrays himself as—and is often perceived as—the underdog, even if he isn’t. But how does he pull that off? He was the number-one guy in late night from 1995 to 2014. I think he subconsciously believed he was not as good as Letterman. But I also think he consciously portrayed himself that way because he knew everyone roots for the underdog. There’s a reason he always insisted on being paid less than his
Late Show
counterpart.
One of my favorite
Tonight Show
features was “Jaywalking,” Jay’s version of “man-on-the-street” interviews. The concept was created by Steve Allen, the original host of
The Tonight Show.
But Jaywalking brought a unique twist to this well-known routine: The people being interviewed tended to be stupid—really stupid—about everything from world events to history to the identity of prominent political leaders. But it was funny simply because their blissful ignorance was so unbelievable:
Jay: Who was the first president?
Person: Benjamin Franklin.
Jay: In what country would you find the Panama Canal?
Person: I haven’t a clue.
Jay: What year was Independence Day?
Person: July 4, 1864.
Sometimes the answers were amazingly clever, even though they weren’t meant to be:
Jay: What was the Gettysburg Address?
Person: I don’t know the exact address.
Jay: How many stars in the [American] flag?
Person: It’s moving too fast to count them.
Jay: What president was named “Tricky Dick”?
Person: Bill Clinton.
Jay and the writers of Jaywalking were often asked how many people they had to talk to for each one that aired. The answer was: surprisingly few. At the same time, there was admittedly a little sleight of hand involved. A successful Jaywalking segment was all about location. The best spots were Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles and Universal CityWalk in Universal City. The key was to find the places where trendy people hung out. In the early days, Jaywalking was shot in Burbank, a typical family community where they found very few “stupid people.”
I believe Jaywalking was really about Jay Leno himself. It was his clever way of getting even with the world for all those Cs he got in school. He was thumbing his nose while winking at his fifth grade teacher, who wrote on his report card, “If James spent as much time on his studies as he does trying to be funny, he’d be an A student.” But he was never malicious about it. He was having fun.
Chapter Two
Funny Is Funny
I used to watch
The Tonight Show
with my dad when I was a kid. I thought of it as a show for grown ups, so I felt privileged when he let me stay up late with him to see Johnny Carson tell jokes and his guests relate funny stories, which we laughed at together. I always made sure to laugh when my dad did, even though I didn’t always get the joke. I sensed something special was happening; it was as if he was allowing me into the exclusive club of adults for the first time.
So when I was hired as a
Tonight Show
producer, I thought I had just been selected to join the elite ranks of such luminary humorists as Samuel Clements, Will Rogers, Bob Hope, Steve Allen, and Johnny Carson: all pillars in the great and unique American art form of topical humor. All right, maybe I got a little carried away.
Watching the show with my dad taught me that comedy resonates with us in a powerful, often enigmatic, way. A funny story can ease the tension in our lives like nothing else. It can help us tolerate someone with whom we disagree on just about everything. A good joke can even cause us to reconsider how we think about someone or something.
I believe we seriously need to laugh. It has to do with the old cliché “life is too short.” We never think much about that phrase. We just say it and smile. But deep down in our bones we all know that, despite o
ur best efforts, we’re not going to get out of this life alive. It’s the ultimate irony, and that’s why irony is the essence of comedy.
When I got the job at
The Tonight Show
I had never thought much about what makes something funny. But it didn’t take long for me to understand just how elusive comedy could be. We never really know if a joke will make people laugh. If we did, there would be no bad jokes.
I quickly gained a new respect for good comedians and began to understand that there is much wisdom in what they say. They’ve thought about life and have tried to figure it out. They’ve had to. You can’t write funny jokes unless you have a consistent point of view, which makes you a philosopher—sometimes a good one. Jay Leno would’ve laughed me out of the room if I called him a philosopher to his face, though I’ve learned much about both comedy and life simply by being around him.
The heart of Jay’s comedy was his monologue, which he considered the best part of his job. It was more than twice as long as Letterman’s and more political than either Letterman’s or Johnny Carson’s. Among Washington’s politicos, Jay’s monologue was considered the one of record.
Jay’s passion for topicality went back to his days as a club comic when he would incorporate the day’s news into his standup routine. At that time his audience consisted of one hundred to two hundred people; at
Tonight,
he was reaching millions throughout the world with his timely humor.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, which tracks late-night humor, studied 43,892 of Jay’s monologue jokes about politicians, a figure that covered all but his last two weeks on the air. Jay told 4,607 jokes about Bill Clinton, earning the former president the dubious distinction of being Jay’s biggest target. As center director Robert Lichter said, “Leno’s monologues focused on power and scandal, and Bill Clinton was the top twofer.”
George W. Bush came in second with 3,239 jokes. Al Gore got 1,026, President Obama garnered 1,011, and Hillary Clinton rounded out the top five with 939. The study said Jay told 10,885 jokes about Democrats, 15 percent more than the 9,465 jokes he did about Republicans, but a Democrat was president 13 of the 22 years Jay was on the air.
Lichter told the Washington Post in 2008 that Jay was “responsible for making late night a source of political humor.” He added, “Carson had political jokes, but they were mostly filler. For Leno, it was the main thing. Whenever a public figure was involved in some personal foible, you knew you’d hear about it on Leno.”
But Jay’s monologue wasn’t all about biting political humor, because he knew his audience wanted more than that. “I’m doing this broad thing of a smart joke, a silly joke, and then a joke unrelated to politics. That’s what
The Tonight Show
is—it’s big-tent comedy,” he told
Parade.
His jokes were also observational, covering what was happening in people’s everyday lives: eating habits, fast-food restaurants and the large portions they served, the differences between men and women, and the absurdities of government bureaucracy. Jay never tried to be preachy or push an agenda, as some late-night hosts do. Naturally, his humor reflected his personal opinions, but it also respected the views of his audience.
In recent years, Jay’s monologue became more technically complex, relying more on video drop-ins, graphics, and special effects. However, the art of writing jokes hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s grueling, demanding, but uncomplicated work. Monologue jokes are made up of only two elements: a setup and a punch line. The setup provides the context for the punch line, the part of the joke that makes you laugh. A good setup should be brief. That allows you to get to the payoff, or punch line, quickly. There are variations to this format, but overall it’s pretty basic, as you can see from this typical joke taken from Jay’s monologue:
The economy is in bad shape. In fact, the economy is so bad, President Barack Obama’s new slogan is “Spare Change You Can Believe In.”
Setup: The economy’s in bad shape.
Punch line: In fact, the economy is so bad, President Barack Obama’s new slogan is “Spare change you can believe in.”
Obviously, the purpose of a joke is to make people laugh. The setup and the punch line are just the means to an end. This topical joke works because it puts a surprise twist on President Obama’s familiar campaign slogan by using the words “spare change” in place of “change.”
Surprise, misdirection, and exaggeration are the three hallmarks of comedy, which is simply a form of deception. Good jokes are written by joining one idea to another in an unexpected way. Surprise and misdirection are often used together, though not exclusively. Here are two examples from Jay’s monologues:
In Austin, Texas, President Obama told an audience: If you want to go forward, put your car in “D”. If you want to go backward, put your car in “R.” But you know something, either way, the economy is still “F”’d.
It’s freezing across the United States. In fact, in DC, the weather is so bad, they actually hired convicted criminals to shovel snow at the US Capitol. Isn’t that amazing? It’s nice to see members of Congress doing something useful for a change.
Exaggeration is the true workhorse of comedy. Such jokes frequently use numbers:
The number of Americans who are obese now outnumber[s] the number of Americans who are merely overweight. One-third of all Americans are obese. You know what that means? One out of every three people is three people.
I’ve just pontificated more about humor than I’ve ever heard Jay do in all the years I’ve known him. I think it’s fun to figure out what makes something funny, even though it’s a no-no in the business. You can analyze the laughs right out of a joke. Or, as E.B. White put it, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process.”
Jay has one basic rule: “Funny is funny.” This means that if a joke or an anecdote makes you laugh, go with it, even if you don’t understand why you just laughed. This idea was confusing to me at first. It implies there is no rhyme or reason to the process, and it sounds more like an absurdity than a rule. But then, comedy is absurdity.
Jay used to tell a joke about a cat that showed up on an airplane, causing the pilot to turn the plane around and land. He said the cat must have been a member of al kitty (as in al Qaeda). It was just a silly line, an absurdity. But it got lots of laughs. Funny is funny.
Jay would often turn down my comedy ideas for no apparent reason. I found this very discouraging until one day he told me a story, which I will paraphrase:
Don’t ever ask me to dress up in a gorilla suit and go out on stage. I won’t do it. Just think about it. What if I’m out there in a gorilla suit, and nobody’s laughing. Now I’m stuck out there in a gorilla suit, and nobody’s laughing.
In other words: just because you think something looks or sounds funny doesn’t mean it will be funny.
Jay’s “Gorilla-Suit Rule” has surely saved him from thousands of really dumb ideas, including many of mine. There’s nothing inherently funny about a guy coming out on the stage in a gorilla suit. He’s essentially just a setup without a punch line.
The idea only works if it’s part of a larger, cohesive concept. Let’s say the guy in the gorilla suit is portraying a gorilla imitating a human who thinks he’s funny just because he’s wearing a gorilla suit. The “gorilla” thinks it’s a pretty weak routine, and he tells this to the audience. With a look of incredulity he says, “I’m sorry, who evolved from whom?” Then he walks off stage.
The Tonight Show
featured some very funny running comedy sketches, including Jaywalking, which consisted of interviews Jay did with average people. The point of this bit was that folks didn’t know much about politics, history, or geography but were quite knowledgeable about pop culture. And l
ike many viewers, I loved the popular “Headlines” segment. In this bit Jay showed actual headlines, stories, and ads from newspapers and other sources, submitted by viewers. They were unintentionally funny because of double meanings, misspelled words, bad syntax, and factual or grammatical errors.
Jay himself brought this idea to the show after having written a number of “Headlines” books. Steve Allen, the show’s original host in the ’50s, would hold up and discuss offbeat newspaper stories. Jay perfected the concept and made it his own.
While some of the headlines were funny at first glance, many of them wouldn’t have made you laugh if you had seen them in the paper. They were only amusing because Jay made them work with a punch line or a simple reaction. For example:
Headline: Menu from a restaurant featuring sandwiches with accompaniments such as lettuce, tomato, onion, penis, etc.
Jay: I’m just going to stick with tomato and onion.
Headline: Ad for a house at 1208 White Bitch Lane
Jay: My name is Susan. I live at White Bitch Lane. Why can’t I find any men?
Headline: “Troutt Named to Salmon Board”
Jay: Seems like a conflict of interest to me.
I was privileged to be cast in bit parts in many of Jay’s comedy sketches. Since I have the conservative look, I was usually featured as a guy wearing a suit. Following a string of Amtrak accidents, I played the president of the company wrapped head to toe in bandages and sitting in the audience as Jay told a joke about Amtrak’s president insisting their trains were safe to ride.
As “Vice President Dick Cheney’s Secret Service agent,” I was shown running to keep up with Cheney as a stuntman portrayed him doing cartwheels after receiving heart surgery. I was even cast as a hero on New Year’s Day in 1997, bravely saving tourists at NBC from a “runaway champagne cork.”
It was fun being included in the bits, but the comedy I most enjoyed consisted of the jokes Jay told the guests backstage before the show.
These weren’t necessarily his funniest, and most weren’t even original. But they shed some light on how Jay carried out his job as the host of the show. Most of the time he saw his guests as just that—guests. And he liked to welcome them with a good joke.
It was an excellent strategy. Guests were often a bundle of nerves before they went on, and his jokes always helped cut the tension. What’s more, he picked material they could relate to. For professional athletes, he had this story:
A guy was working late one night with a female client. One thing led to another. They had a drink or two, ended up in bed and had sex. The guy immediately felt terrible about it and decided to come clean with his wife. When he got home, he told her everything and asked for her forgiveness. He said it was the first time he had ever been unfaithful and that he would never do it again. But his wife told him she didn’t believe him: “You think I’m stupid enough to buy that? You were out golfing again, weren’t you?”
For politicians and political commentators, both Democrats and Republicans:
A guy was scheduled to speak at a political convention, but he was one of many speakers that day. And they had droned on well into the night. By the time he got to the podium there was only one man left in the audience. The speaker told the man he was flattered that the man had waited for this speech. The guy replied that he was only there because he was the next speaker.
For actresses whose priority was to look beautiful and sexy, Jay would tell naughty jokes. For child actors he would go through several knock-knock jokes and then listen to theirs. For very young actors (six and under) he would do an impression of a bee.
The trick to doing “Write joke. Tell joke. Get paid.” was that the next day you had to do it all over again with the same level of enthusiasm. And the day after that. And the one after that. Jay never seemed to get overwhelmed by the routine. He loved it. In fact, he craved it.
