Jay Leno, the People’s Comedian

“I don’t think things change that much over a generation,” Jay Leno said. “The vast majority of people are in the middle. I see comedians who do incredibly racist, sexist, raunchy stuff. I do my act, which is clean, and people come up afterward and say, ‘Thank you.’ ”

Leno has always had the talent to amuse.

His recent naming as permanent guest host of “The Tonight Show” is, in effect, a thank-you note and an endorsement for keeping the American heartland trust.

For Johnny Carson and the producers of “The Tonight Show,” it wasn’t just a matter of finding the most currently popular comedian or famous guest to fill in while Carson is away. That’s already been tried, often with disappointing results. The honorific implies more of a succession, a heartbeat away from being emperor of TV’s late night.

“After Joan (Rivers), we looked for someone pleasant and efficient and”--there was an exquisitely diplomatic pause--”good to work with,” Fred de Cordova, executive producer of “The Tonight Show,” observed of choosing Leno for the once a week and vacation spot.

“Jay doesn’t seem to be limited in his comedic monologues and interviews. He made a natural progression from guest to host and interviewer. I think you have to be very bright as well as very funny to do this job. Jay’s a very, very hard worker, as is Johnny Carson. I believe in his innate sense of taste. When you sit in the chair, the tendency is to take over the show. But he knows to bite his tongue. Sometimes you can see his mind working, and his temptation to jump in on something, but he has the self-discipline not to.”

Carson will go down in entertainment history as one of the most amazingly durable figures in television, a comedian who could blend barometric topicality, tacit heartland sympathy, show-biz glitter and an absolute purity of comedic touch into a persona that never wore out its welcome--even through dopey sketches with figures like Carnac the Magnificent and Floyd R. Turbo.

Carson and television were born for each other, and for that reason he’ll always be a tough act to follow. But in Leno he’s found a complement and maybe a worthy successor. (Garry Shandling made a delightful and surprisingly deft alternate as well, considering that he’s largely a one-premise comedian, but his involvement with his own show ruled him out of the running.)

At 38, Leno knows the tools of his trade. He’s kept close to his New England roots without being cramped by their parochialism. He has taste, he knows how to shape a joke, he relishes language, and he has the uncanny ability to catch whatever’s in the air at a given moment and give it a glint of comedic gold. He’s a people’s comedian. He’s unimpressed with celebrity. And at heart, he shares this with the best of comedians when he says, “You gotta give people a sense of fair play.”

“You have to be careful that you make fun of a situation or what someone says without making fun of the person himself,” Leno said. “That’s why, when I say, as I did the other night in my monologue, ‘I was in the newsroom and I saw Pat Robertson swapping war stories with Dan Quayle,’ it’s a comment about them without attacking them. You try to find certain standards.

“I think comedy is basically conservative. It reflects on a norm by commenting on its variations, like the English joke about the vicar and the milkmaid’s skirts. It’s a kind of corrective; I think that’s what people recognize in it.”

Leno lounged on one of two facing sofas in the living room of his recently acquired house near Benedict Canyon. Styled after an English country house built of stone and thick rough-hewn wooden beams, it carries the improbable ambiance of hounds at rest, the clanking of victorious and weary knights in from their muddy jousts and rough oaths of fealty before a huge roaring fireplace.

A library, lamps and the careful pictorial mounting of gold-tinged medieval calligraphy--as well as a terraced garden outdoors--soften the effect (Leno’s wife, Mavis, is a beginning bibliophile and a voracious reader). But the house, as was true of their earlier digs in Nichols Canyon, looks immaculately unused. Leno is rarely home for long--Mavis often travels with him on the road--and when he is, he’s usually tinkering with one of his 17 motorcycles, or visiting local comedy clubs to talk with the younger comedians.

“It’s a trade-off,” he said. “I get energy from them, and they get experience from me. I listen to what they’re saying, like, ‘Did you see that so-and-so’s still doing that bit after 15 years?’ And I’ll think, ‘Whoops, I’m still doing that bit. I better cut it.’ ”

On a recent afternoon he made himself a couple of Italian sausage sandwiches and joked about his change of address.

“In our old place, neighbors would always call me up and ask me to help fix something, because I’m good with my hands. Here, nobody does that. We bring a cake over next door to introduce ourselves and they ask, ‘Do you have full staff or half-staff?’ ‘What? Staff? Oh! Yeah, well,’ ” he said, his voice trailing off equivocally. There is of course no staff that’s visible.

The house is a far cry from their old home in more ways than one. He recalled this story about moving into the old house: “We have this New England custom, we bring a cake over to introduce ourselves. The guy comes to the door, ‘What!’ he yells. He’s in a bathrobe. A million watts of light hit me in the face. These girls are pulling on robes and getting off the floor. ‘Well, we’re your new neighbors and we’d just like to bring in a cake to say hello,’ and I see these guys, these cameramen, elbowing each other and winking. It was a porn outfit.”

Leno laughed at his naivete and the folly of his good intentions, as he does when recalling his first visit to Los Angeles in 1977:

“I came here with the same spirit that my grandfather came to Ellis Island. I’m hitchhiking along Santa Monica Boulevard. A guy picks me up, puts his hand on my thigh, ‘So, how’s it goin’?’ ‘Uh, you can let me out right here.’ Another guy picks me up. Same thing. Then another. I look out the window. This guy is standing in the street with a leather G-string and all these straps across his chest. ‘I know you’re just like him,’ the driver says. ‘Only you’re more subtle.’ I realize then what this is all about. Aaaaaaaaahhhh!”

A constant observer, Leno has the raconteur’s ability to capture the piquant detail--often at his own expense. On fame, for example, he reenacted the celebrity’s aversion to eye contact on an airplane, making the approaching fan ill at ease. “Me, I’ll say, ‘How’re ya doin?’ I’ll give the autograph. A guy comes up and you say, ‘No thank you, I don’t give autographs,’ he looks like you’ve taken his pants down. On the other hand, I get these types who come over and say ‘Who’re you supposed to be?’ ‘Uh, well, I guest host “The Tonight Show.” ’ ‘I watch that show every night and I’ve never seen you.’ ” Or, of the Ohio TV interviewer who confessed she hadn’t seen him and then introduced him on the air as “Jay Leno, who claims to have hosted ‘The Tonight Show’. . . . “

Leno is accustomed to such indignities and in fact rather enjoys relating them. They may refer to his early days when he worked with a couple of strippers who bathed in huge champagne glasses or his being asked to pose as a sales manager for a truckload of aromatic rectal suppositories. Those incidents are correctives of their own.

And there’s always something to disabuse him of the notion of stardom’s modern equivalent of divinity, whether it’s that shaky high school stage in Cedar Rapids, or that new club in Virginia, a converted diner where the audience sits in booths and he can only see their eyes and the tops of their heads.

“People think that interviewing is the hard part,” Leno said. “It’s still the monologue that’s the greatest challenge. To be a good interviewer, all you have to do is listen. I tell people, ‘When I’m through with the monologue, I’m through with the comedy. It’s your turn.’ ”

“Jay has a way of looking at the ordinary and explaining it to us in a way that makes it unusual, and giving it a humorous twist,” said Budd Friedman, who owns the Improvisation and managed Leno in 1972-73.

“This may sound like overreaching, but I think he’s the Groucho Marx of his generation. You’ll hear people say, ‘Did you hear what Leno said last night?’ I always knew he’d be the next big star. He has a mercurial intelligence. Why it took as long as it did for him to hit, I don’t know. Some people thought he wouldn’t photograph well, but I never believed that.”

Friedman was on hand, however, when Leno struck out his first time up before Carson. “Harvey Korman brought Johnny Carson to the club. ‘He doesn’t have 5 minutes,’ Carson said. That’s the way it’d become in comedy. You gotta get on and off in 5 minutes.’ ”

“I was devastated,” Leno recalls. “But he was right. My hour routine had maybe five jokes in it. His monologue has maybe 25. He was like that teacher you hate at first, but wind up respecting all the more because he’s made you make demands on yourself. I was on the show in 8 months, so the lesson paid off.”

Every comedian works out of a subtext, a half-hidden but discernible amalgam of values with which an audience makes its identification beyond jokes. Leno suggests the practical Puritan and blue-collar worker (he was born and raised in Andover, Mass.) at odds with the notion of celebrity (“I was never into being too hip for an audience”). This reference characterizes him: “I won’t do beer commercials because I know Spuds Mackenzie isn’t meant to appeal to 45-year-old Bethlehem steel workers. The appeal is to kids.”

He doesn’t seem to mind that big-time success eluded him for so many years while he worked the comedy trenches (“I’d feel differently if my parents weren’t around to see it”). His past is very much alive in him. He goes home often and visits his old schoolteachers. He keeps in touch with his school friends. Old friends, in fact, help him maintain perspective.

“When I saw Nancy Reagan do her ‘Just Say No’ number on (the show) with Joan Rivers, I didn’t think much of it,” Leno said. “But I called a friend who’s a machinist. He said, ‘Did you see the First Lady? That was really something.’ He made me rethink my perspective.”

Asked if he won’t prune his heavy road schedule, Leno said, “It’s amazing how the work ethic has gone 100% the other way. People say, ‘Why don’t you stay home and rest?’ Comedy is like sports. You have 10 years of a roll, then five of decline, and if you’re lucky, you can go places where people will still want you.” On the other hand, it isn’t the comedian who dates, it’s his attitude and material. Look at Hope, still going at 85. There’s no math involved here, or paper work. My persuasion has always been to please. I guess it’ll always be that way.”