9 "Letterman's favorite comedian" talks about Rolls Royces,"interest- ing" women and the other benefits of life as a comedian Arecord 31 appearances on the Late Night with David Letterman show combined with more than 300 live performances a year, have made Jay Leno the brightest comic star in this thing we like to call show business. Leno's non-stop touring not only earned him upwards of $300,000 last year, but also led to his recently signing a long- term agreement with NBC Television to star in his own series of late-night comedy specials. We caught up with the man who claims he 'never travels first class because nothing interesting ever happens there' at his Hollywood Hills home, where the 1 5-year veteran of the comedy club/college coffeehouse circuit likes to unwind by restoring classic motorcycles. While Leno's frequent on-campus perfor- mances have made him a cult hero of sorts among today's college audiences-he's cur- rently booked a year in advance-his own col- lege career was something less than illustrious: "I was always more or less a screw-off,'' Leno confesses. "So my own college story is real short. I'd go to Emerson College in the morning, work at a Rolls Royce/Mercedes dealership in the afternoon and go down to New York every night and try to get on at the comedy clubs. "Since cars like [a Rolls Royce] only come in one or two at a time, they used to fly me from Boston down to Paramus, New Jersey, to pick them up. I'd take the car and stop off in New York on the way back. I used to like to pull up in front of the Improv every night in a different colored Rolls Royce. The owner thought I was some- body important, so he put me on. "I mean, it was great. Driving around Boston, with my long hair and glasses, everybody thought I was Donovan. But I was never the boola-boola type. I used to go through the [col- lege course] catalog ... What's this? 'Speech Therapy: No written exam. Students will address the class for five minutes on the subject of their choice.' Yeah, I'll take that class, because I could always stand up there and pontificate on some- thing. It was either that or go into the Army. "It's funny, but I'm the only one of my old college friends whose job doesr't somehow contribute to all those things they used to say they were against back then. 'Well, I don't make the Dioxin; I'm just in sales,' you know? With my job nobody gets cancer of the pancreas-they just don't laugh."' 'But I don't find any difference between col- lege students today and college students in the '60s. Sure, they might be a little more patriot- ic-not like a Lyndon LaRouche thing, but more in the sense that they can relate to a movie like Top Gun. But then, not every student who was against the war in Vietnam was out burning down the Bank of America building either.' Leno chuckles. "But I'll tell you how college changes you. I came home for Christmas to An- dover, Massachusetts, which is a small town, the kind of place where everybody hangs around in front of Dalton's Drug Store. And one of these Fonzie-type guys who was a little older than me and worked at the local tire and rubber company, asks me, 'Hey, Leno, I hear you're livin' with some chick down at school or somethin'.' I said, yeah, that's true. He says, 'Yeah? Are you [hav- ing sex with] her?' And, you know, if I'd have just stayed around town, I probably would have asked the same question!" A true story, Leno claims, yet one that illus- trates his ability to extract humor from the most mundane circumstances. Almost alone among his comedic contemporaries, Leno cannot be captured with a simple "nan-oo, nan-oo, or you look mah-velous" catchphrase. And Leno is determined notto be ste- * reotyped, ''Yeah, people have tried to pin me with the 'evil twin' thing," Leno grimaces. ''And 'What's my beef?' And since that one Letterman show, peo- ple everywhere have been yelling for this 'Kimba' joke. Well, I don't want to get stuck, so I had to get rid of it. It's just a joke. 'You see, when I was in the sixth grade and screwing around, I had gotten this reputation of having a hard head. So this kid in shop class hit me in the head with a hammer. Owl I saw stars. I was fighting back tears, laughing, pretending it didn't hurt at all. ''It was terriblel The self-humiliation. All caused by my trying to live up to what I had pre- tended to be. I decided I never wanted that to happen to me again. It's like, after all these years, whenever Carroll'D'Connor goes out on a talk show he still has to convince people that he's not Archie Bunker. It's almost like he's forced to be serious because otherwise people expect him to reel off a litnany of racial slurs.'' Leno is insistent."I'm no different onstage than off. A bit more exaggerated, sure. But I think comedians are like that. All that stuff about 'laughing-on-the-outside, crying-on-the-inside,' I don't get it. It's precisely Leno's workmanlike attitude to- ward comedy that enables him to function in such unlikely roles as master of ceremonies for America's leading advertising trade convention. "It was like any other job," Leno explains. "Most of those advertising people are not that serious. Some are very creative. Sure, there's the sales people and the egomaniac who gets offended, but it was great. "I was introducing these commercials that won awards. One used the Pointer Sisters' [song] 'Jump' foran ad that ends with 'There's more to life than laundry' and the wife and the husband going out on a date. So, when the com- mercial ended, I said, 'There's more to life than laundry-Saul Bellow, '1978' and the place broke up that this stupid idiotic phrase won this award, Leno chuckled at the memory. "No, I don't see anything wrong with doing ads for Doritos. I made fun of it on Letterman. Took some Doritos out of my pocket, ate them, 'Ahh, refreshing!' I've always felt you could make fun of things from within rather than above." Leno does, however, draw the line some- where. "But I won't do beer ads. I don't drink and I don't think these beer companies should be trying to get 'young adults'-which we all know him." Leno pauses. "But I see thousands and thousands of kids every day who copy his style, throw a lot of obscenities around, but there's no real anger there, no feeling of injustice that Pryor has. It's just contrived, and it doesn't work. "Now, with all the comedy clubs, it's easy to get into the business. But to stay in and make a living is hard. You either have it or you don't. When people see someone play a musical instrument, they're amazed, because that's something most people can't do. But when they see a comedian go on stage and just talk, they think, well, hell, I can talk and I'm funny-because saying you're not funny is like saying you're a bad lay. Every- body thinks they're funny. "And I get this all the time. The other day these two guys came up to me and asked me 'Could we use your agent to get some work here in town?' I thought they were put-ons." Leno sug- gested they start at the usual small clubs for as- piring comics. "And they said, 'Well, yeah-yeah- yeah, but if you let us use your agent we won't have to do those jobs.' I was waiting for some- one to say, 'You asshole, you believed them,' but they were quite serious. They thought if my agent could just book them for five grand a week somewhere, they'd be fine," As might be expected, this manic mechanic takes a particularly nuts-and-bolts view toward the necessity for paying one's comic dues. "My advice to young people is always the same. Try to get as much stage time as possible. Be the guy who emcees the talent show, because it's hard to be funny and a good speaker at the same time. You've got to learn the one skill first. And if you go onstage at a comedy club, do it some- where away from your friends because they're just going to laugh and holler and give you a hard time. "Don't just go down to the Improv or the Comedy Store on amateur night. The people who go there are professionals. I've always said that the worst thing for a comedian is to make $20,000 a year doing something else. It's easi- er to start out with nothing and just live off the land, sleeping on friends' couches and eating out of their refrigerators for the five years it takes to really learn your craft." One of the benefits of such a nomadic lifestyle lies in the opportunities for meeting a lot of, er, interesting women. "When I was single, it was fun " Leno shrugs. "You tend to meet a lot of women in show business, especially as a come- dian. I think that women really like to laugh. They like a sense of humor above a lot of other things, which most men don't realize. Most guys think a Rambo-type character is more attractive than a funny guy, which"-Leno cocks an eyebrow- "is not necessarily true," * Don Waller writes on entertainment for the Los Angeles Times and is the author of The Mo- town Storv means kids-to drink beer. I don't want people to expect me to drink beer on stage, and I don't want some father to come to my show saying, 'My kid got killed because of your ad It's all a matter of personal morality. I draw the line at taking money for something I don't use. While acknowledging his respect and affection for such elder comic states- men as Rodney Dangerfield and Shecky Green, Leno names George Carlin and Robert Klein as his primary comic he- roes, explaining that "it was the time. When I was a kid, all the comedians were over 40, doing material from my Dad's point-of-view, you know, the-kids-with-the-long-hair. "I remember watching the Beatles on Ed Sui- van with my Dad. I wanted to be real hip and impress him, so I told him, 'You know, they write all their own music ' And my Dad says, 'Whad- dya mean. Some fancy guy gives these kids a couple of bucks to go out and act loony.' " Leno cracks up at the memory. "Then all of a sudden there were these younger comedians who made jokes about a Stones' album cut, making fun of stuff that me and my friends talked about. Untilthen, I actually thought that you had to be poor, Jewish and born on the Lower East Side of New York to be a comedian. "I liked Andy Kaufman, sure. Ilike Sam Kinne- son. He makes me laugh.. Pryor's great. I love Ampersand Ampersand 13