One of the most successful comedians of all time is coming to Michigan this week.
Jay Leno will appear Friday night at the FireKeepers Casino in Battle Creek.
Leno made his first standup comedy appearance on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson in 1977, and the show was his 15 years later.
His first joke as full-time Tonight Show host was to say to the wildly cheering audience, “Let’s see how you all feel in 30 years!”
He didn’t quite make it to 30, but Leno hosted The Tonight Show for more than two decades.
Comedians have a wealth of political material to work with these days, so you might think Jay Leno is a little jealous of today’s late night hosts, but you’d be wrong.
“No, not at all. You know, it’s become so nasty," Leno said. "Like Johnny Carson, I used to pride myself on making fun of both sides. ‘Oh, Mr. Leno, you and your Republican friends! Well, Mr. Leno, you and your Democratic buddies!’. Or, both sides would be mad at you and you’d go ‘okay, this is perfect!'. I mean, it’s very odd, it is an odd time that way.”
So, Leno isn’t doing political gags in his standup. He says when word gets around that there’s no politics in his show, ticket sales go up. In explaining that, he cites his old friend, the late standup comic Rodney Dangerfield.
“I knew Rodney for 40 years. I have no idea if he was a Democrat or a Republican. It was always about the jokes,” he explained.
“When we got together, “Hey, hey Jay, what do you think of this? Jay, what do you think of that?’, and OK, that’s pretty good, that’s funny. It was never like, oh, you know, you shouldn’t do that because I think that’s going to hurt so and so in the primary."
"Shut up! You’re a comedian, that’s what it should be," he added.
Leno made millions hosting The Tonight Show, and he’s 74-years-old now, but he says he’s still driven to hit the road for live shows. Being the child of parents who lived through the Great Depression, he says he’s always lived like he’s broke.
“People always make a big deal of this, but I never touched any of my Tonight Show money. I wanted to live on the money I made as a comedian, because TV is one of those tenuous [things]. It could be 13 weeks, or it could be 22 years. It could end at any point, so I always just put that away. Just put that away, you might need it someday, this is the real money, you know?”
Unlike many of today’s top comics, Leno doesn’t tour to work up material for the filming of a TV special. He says his aim is to stay on the road so he never has to do that. He continued that the joy is in the performing.
"I enjoy seeing regular people’s faces, which I don’t see a lot," Leno said. "I think the more fun your life is, the more serious you want your humor, but the more serious your life is, the more silly you want your humor.”
Leno no longer has a staff writing jokes for him like he did during his days on The Tonight Show, so he writes his own material, though he adds that his jokes aren’t written down at all. He’s dyslexic, so he carries it all around in his head. He says that if something is funny, you remember it, and if it isn’t funny, you forget it.
"On TV, you do new material in the same place every day. On the road, you do the same material in a different place every day," Leno said. "It’s fun to work on it. You do it one way Monday, one way Tuesday, and by the time the weekend comes, oh, you’ve got it down where you want it to be, so I enjoy that process.”
Jay Leno’s appearance at FireKeepers starts at 8 p.m. on May 24.
