After all these years, Jay Leno still puts on a show

Leno has “about 210 cars and 168 motorcycles” in his car collection stored in Burbank, Calif. (courtesy Big Dog Productions)

Updated 5/23/2025 6:35 AM

Jay Leno has made a living out of making people laugh.

At 75, he is still making people laugh, but rest assured it is not for the money.

After all these years, Leno still loves being a stand-up comedian. Oregon fans will get to see it first-hand on Friday, June 20, when Leno joins Arsenio Hall for a comedy spectacular at Chinook Winds Casino and Resort in Lincoln City.

Leno’s greatest claim to fame came as the successor to Johnny Carson as host for the Tonight Show, a gig he did masterfully for 22 years. From 1987-92, Leno served as “regular guest host” for the Carson show. He took it over and hosted from 1992-2009 and 2010-14. Since 2014, he has played host to “Jay Leno’s Garage,” the perfect outlet for a gearhead from way back that first aired on CNBC and now plays on YouTube.

I first saw Leno’s act live when he headlined the Trail Blazers’ “Slam N’ Jam” event at Civic Stadium in the summer of 1992. He killed it that night in front of a crowd that must have been more than 15,000. Thirty-some years later, he is still killing it. For my money, he is right there with Letterman behind Carson as the greatest late-night talk-show hosts in television history.

Hall, 69, is also a celebrity of special note. He has performed a variety of duties in TV during his long career, most notably as host of the “Arsenio Hall” late-night talk show for six years. He, too, has an affinity for comedy.

I reached Leno at his beloved “Jay Leno Garage” in Burbank, Calif., not far from his home in Beverly Hills. It’s where Leno houses his sensational classic car collection, and, I’m guessing, where he most likes to hang out in the world.

KE:  I read where you still do something like 200 shows a year. Is that accurate?

LENO: I guess so. I enjoy doing it. I’m dyslexic. I don’t have anything written down, so I don’t know the numbers. It’s like going to a gym. It keeps you sharp, so you’re not stumbling on stage.

KE: Do you do a lot of casinos? Do you still do shows at colleges?

LENO: I do a lot of casinos. I do a lot of charity events — I have one tonight. I enjoy doing those for various causes. You are getting paid for doing something you would do for free. I would be telling people jokes, anyway. I haven’t done a college show in awhile. Things have changed a little bit. The college shows I do are like on a parents weekend. I don’t know why a college student would be interested in a 75-year-old comedian. When I was a kid, though, I would go see Mort Sahl. I was a big follower of (Robert) Klein and (George) Carlin and all those guys. Even Uncle Dirty. Remember him?

KE: No I don’t. (I looked it up. Real name: Bob Altman.)

LENO: He was a character.

KE: You are doing your Chinook Winds show with Arsenio Hall. How well do you know him, and how often have you guys done performances together?

LENO: We do a lot of shows together. I’m five years older than Arsenio. He wanted to be a comic when I was working as a comic. He came to see me. We became friends. And then he got his show and I got mine. We have been good buddies for a long time. I enjoy working with him. Very funny guy.

KE: I’m assuming you guys do separate acts, with Arsenio coming on first? Are you on stage at the same time at all during the evening?

LENO: I will introduce him, and he will introduce me. We don’t do bits together. (It’s not like) if one comic is funny, let’s get five comics. It’s not five times funnier, because everybody is stepping on everybody. It doesn’t work that way. So it is two separate (performances). It seems to work well.

KE: You grew up in Andover, Mass., 25 miles from Boston? What was that like?

LENO: I would say it was the East Coast equivalent of Oregon. New England was an interesting place to grow up. I liked it as a kid. In New England, I was the laziest kid anybody knew. When I came to California, I was suddenly the hardest-working guy. It just shows you the difference in the work ethic between the two places. It was a nice place to grow up. It became a bedroom community (of Boston). My parents paid $19,000 for their house and we had 3 1/2 acres. Now it would be $2 million. You went from homemade stuff to the five-dollar chocolate chip cookies.

Whenever I go back to Boston, I get what I call “Boston compliments.” I was on Melrose Street and this guy actually said to me, “Hey Jay, my friend met you in California. He said you’re not an a—hole.” I said, “Well thank you.” He said, “No, really, he said that.” I said, “Well tell him thanks, man.” He said, “OK, see you later.” That’s a Boston compliment. It’s as good as you’re going to get.

It’s that New England suspicion. If a kid has a BMW, “What are you, a Tesla baby? Your daddy buy you a car?” You go to Boston, it’s like in “Good Will Hunting.” You have MIT and Harvard on one side and Southie — the blue collar set — on the other end. They meet sometimes and there is always a clash between the two: The street smarts of Southie vs. the erudite elitist. That’s what I love about America. We are suspicious of education.

KE: How old were you when you started stand-up comedy?

LENO: I started in 1969. I was 19 years old and going to school at Emerson College in Boston. My parents wanted me to finish school. You know — “I needed something to fall back on.” It’s funny. You come to California and eight- or nine-year-old kids want to be a lighting director. Where I grew up, nobody had show business aspirations. There was no way to get into it. One of the neighbors said to me, “You can’t be a comedian unless your father was a comedian.” I said, “I never heard that.” People who know nothing about show business feel free to give you advice.

KE: Your father, Angelo Leno, was an insurance salesman, right?

LENO: My dad was a prize fighter and an insurance salesman. He was a tough guy. A street kid with Golden Gloves.

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KE: When you were starting, where were your gigs?

LENO: I would go around to places and try to get on stage. It is different now. When I would go to places, I never met another person who wanted to be a comedian until I went to New York after seven or eight months. Now everybody wants to do it. You have all sorts of outlets — YouTube and everything else.

Back then, I played mostly strip joints and Army bases. Prison shows were the funniest to me.  After doing a few, I’m thinking, “OK, this is not the standard crowd.”

KE: After you took over the Tonight Show in 1992, you continued to do stand-up comedy? How did you make that work?

Jay Leno headlines a comedy show at Chinook Winds Casino in Lincoln City on June 20 (courtesy Big Dog Productions)

LENO: I always considered myself a standup comedian who was lucky enough to get a TV show. Most TV shows last 13 weeks. I was lucky that mine lasted 22 years. Sooner or later, it’s going to end. But standup comedy is like golf. You can play it until you are 70 or 80 as long as you pace yourself. Plus, I like the low-tech aspect of it.

Nowadays, I fly into a town. The plane lands at 7:15. It’s a half-hour drive to the gig. I go on at 8 o’clock. With (music) bands, you load in and load out, and you have rehearsal. The pickup bass player got drunk, and we gotta get another one. That doesn’t happen with comedy.

KE: How well did you get to know Johnny Carson? What did you think of him?

LENO: I liked Johnny. When I was a kid, I liked comedians who looked normal but were funny. I was not a big fan of the pie-in-the-face or physical comedians. I liked people like Jack Benny, Carson, (Bill) Cosby before the obvious. People who just looked regular. They didn’t have any sort of gimmick.

In New England, it wasn’t like in California where people go, “Jay, these are my parents, Bob and Agnes.” And I would say, “How are you, Mr. and Mrs. Metticelli? I can’t call you Bob and Agnes.” So whenever I would do the Carson show, I would go, “Thank you, Mr. Carson.” He would go, “Jay, it’s Johnny.” It always felt awkward.

But when I started doing (David) Letterman, he was a guy my own age. We started out together. I could be a smart ass and make fun of his tie and just trash him to his face. With Carson, you couldn’t really do that. There was an odd sort of thing there. Doing the Letterman show in the early days, that was the favorite time of my career.

KE: Why?

LENO: It was loose. I would go in there with a certain kind of material and Dave would go off on a tangent. And then we would be funny off the cuff, which is what I really like. That’s when you know you are making it, when you can just wing it and trust your instincts. It’s nice to have something prepared, but being able to talk off the cuff, that is what was fun for me. Dave and I were quite opposite. Dave was a great wordsmith, very smart, but a hesitant performer. He didn’t really like doing standup in front of people. I am the other way around. People watch me and ask, “How can you be so loose up there?” I mean, I don’t know.

When I would do the Letterman show, I would run downstairs and get a huge meatball sandwich. I would stand by the makeup room. As soon as Dave came around the corner, I would start eating it. I would say, “Dave, try this sandwich.” He would go, “How can you eat that? We go on in 10 minutes.” I would say, “Oh Dave, it’s delicious.” And then I started bringing the sandwich out with me and dropping a meatball on his desk. It was really so much fun.

KE: So much was made of the rivalry between the two of you, and about you succeeding Johnny on the Tonight Show instead of him. He left NBC for CBS over it.

LENO: Who do you tackle? The one with the ball. That’s the way sports is played. I always liked Dave. He was always my favorite. I always thought he was good. We were lucky. He got the critical acclaim; I got the ratings. Or I could have switched it — either way — but we both got something out of it.

Letterman was so successful at 12:30 (a.m.), the network was never going to move him (to 11:30 p.m.). When I started filling in for Johnny — I did that for five years — I kind of got the same numbers as Johnny did. So they had two hits — a hit at 11:30 and a huge hit at 12:30, a spot where they never had anything before. Howard Stern started that — “Leno stole it from him” — but Letterman never had it. He would be the first to tell you that. (Network executives) weren’t sure Dave’s sensibility would work at 11:30, but it worked perfectly at 12:30. Huge hit, good demographic, college kids loved it. (Talk of their feud) would sting once in awhile, but it was OK. I am still a huge fan. I still think he is the funniest guy out there.

KE: I loved the short Super Bowl commercial you did with Letterman and Oprah Winfrey in 2010.

LENO: Everybody thought that was AI-generated. I flew to New York and we did it real quick and I flew home the same day.

KE: After you left the Tonight Show, you had a long run with Jay Leno’s Garage, which aired weekly on CNBC. I was looking at a list of the guests you had through the years — like a Who’s Who of the biggest names in entertainment, sports, and politics.

LENO: I’m still doing Jay Leno’s garage. CNBC didn’t want to go popular culture anymore; they wanted to be strictly business. Now we are on YouTube. Same format. Less celebrity; more car.

KE: Your car collection is stored at Jay Leno’s Garage in Burbank. How big is the garage?

LENO: 140,000 square feet.

Leno still finds relaxation in working on vehicles in “Jay Leno’s Garage” (courtesy Big Dog Productions)

KE: You also have some motorcycles there, right?

LENO: A lot of motorcycles, cars, steam engines — anything that rolls, explodes and makes noise.

KE: How many vehicles are stored there?

LENO: About 210 cars, 168 motorcycles.

KE: What is the total collection valued at?

LENO: Oh, I don’t know. People always ask that. “How much did this cost?” I really don’t know what it’s worth. I never sell anything, so technically, it’s not really worth anything until after I die.

KE: Have you driven all the vehicles?

LENO: (Laughs) Yes, of course. They are all on the road. Why would you buy a car and not drive it?

KE: You must have plenty of security watching the place.

LENO: Oh yeah, we’ve got all that. The stuff I have, I am sure thieves could find some value in it. There are cars of which there were only a half-dozen made. But what do you do with it? You can’t really sell it. If I had all Volkswagens here, that would probably be more valuable. When you have a 1932 Packard Twelve, there are only seven of them left — OK. If one gets stolen, where you gonna sell it?

KE: How did you get so interested in motor vehicles?

LENO: I grew up in New England. There were always broken snowmobiles and lawnmowers and tractors to fix. Back when I was a kid, when a car would break down, people would abandon it by the side of the road. You could buy it from the police for 25 dollars and drag it home, fix it up and get it running.

KE: Do you watch late-night talk shows now?

LENO: No, but not for the reason you would think. When I was still doing the Tonight Show, they passed a law that after midnight you could have an extra two minutes of commercials. So you watch a late-night show now and get six minutes of a monologue and then five or six minutes of commercials. The 30-second commercials are so well-done, they feel like they’re two minutes. Once you get used to streaming — Peacock, Law and Order and all these shows — if I see “Jake from State Farm” again, I am going to shoot myself in the head. It’s the same stuff over and over. The reason I don’t watch late night is the incessant commercials. But I do enjoy hearing the jokes. I enjoy hearing what everybody does.

KE: What kind of comedy do you enjoy now?

LENO: Have you ever heard of Dry Bar comedy? (Go to drybarcomedy.com.) It is 100 percent squeaky-clean comedy. I like it because they don’t have the crutch of saying f—k or a—hole. I like to see well-constructed jokes.

Rodney (Dangerfield) and I were good friends. I knew him for 40 years. I have no idea if he was a Republican or Democrat. We just discussed jokes all the time. With Rodney, it was the economy of words. That’s what comedy is. A couple of my favorite Rodney jokes: “I went to a doctor. He wanted a urine sample, a semen sample, and a stool sample. So I gave him my underpants.” Such a stupid joke. My other favorite Rodney joke: “I walked past a place. It was topless and bottomless. I went in. There was nobody there.”

I find when you have limits on comedy you become more creative. The fun part is getting as close to the line as you can without going over it. That’s what I enjoy.

KE: You have won Emmys, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. You were inducted into the TV Academy Hall of Fame. Is there an award you are particularly proud of?

LENO: The real trick to doing this is, you don’t believe the good stuff or the bad stuff. I never shoot for happiness; I shoot for content. If you are happy all the time, you are a crazy person. Happiness is a euphoric state. You can’t be in it all the time. People ask, what’s the best day of your life? Well, yesterday was pretty good. Nothing bad happened. That’s the way I am. You can’t just believe your good reviews and not believe your bad ones. I just take it all in stride.

KE: Your wife of 45 years, Mavis, is dealing with the effects of dementia. How is she doing, and how are you doing with all of it?

LENO: You have to find the humor in it. I like being with her. My wife was very much involved with women’s rights issues. She got a Nobel peace prize nomination. (Mavis chaired “the Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls” for many years. Under her leadership, the organization was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012).

With Alzheimer’s, you’re in and out of it. We try to watch TV shows that are not continuing, not a five-part series, because she won’t remember what happened last night. I go to Amazon and watch a “Hawaii Five-0” (episode). And McGarrett is saying to every woman, “Honey, sweetie, come over here.” Everything is honey and sweetie to him. Stanley Holloway, an actor from the ‘60s, plays this eccentric American genetic engineer captured by the Red Chinese. McGarrett goes to see the scientist’s daughter, who is like 38 years old. He says to her, “What kind of genetic engineering did your father do?” She says, “As a woman, I don’t understand such things.” And Mavis is screaming at the TV about it.

The fact that she is cognizant enough to be angry about that … it’s the little victories. It’s stuff like that that makes me laugh. No matter how zonked out the Alzheimer’s has her, she still has the women’s rights (issue) in her brain.

KE: As you look at your career, what matters most to you?

LENO: I am a huge believer in low self-esteem. It is the key to success. If you don’t think you’re the smartest person in the room, you shut up and listen. I have so many friends who when they get a break or a TV show, they want to direct, they want to do the lighting, they have ideas for the whole show. They wind up making enemies. You wind up having these shows where the staff doesn’t care if they lose their job as long as you lose yours.

When I got the Tonight Show, I got it under the premise that anybody (employed there) could pull the cord and stop the train. If there was a joke and an intern thought it was offensive, OK, let’s discuss it. Sometimes they are right, and sometimes I am right. It made for a steady ship. Everybody thought they were a part of it.

We had the same staff for 22 years. The fun part was, most of the people I hired had never done this before. When you are doing a TV show, you are doing 16 to 18 hours a day sometimes. So everybody intermarried. We wound up having 64 children born in the time we did the show. On the last show, we brought them all out. Some of the kids were 18 and 19. Some were just babies. It was cool. Everybody had titles, but it didn’t matter.

We had a transgender person on the show before that was fashionable. I did a joke and I heard he was hurt by it. I said, “I will never do those jokes again. I didn’t realize you were upset.” He turned out to be the best employee. He worked hard for the show. Stayed overtime. It doesn’t take much. Just common decency is the key.

KE: What kind of a show can the people who attend your event at Chinook Winds expect?

LENO: Hopefully a funny show. I don’t use any obscenities. I have taken politics out of the act. You wind up losing half the audience. When I go to see James Taylor, I don’t care what the politics are. I want to see him play “Carolina on My Mind.”

KE: Funny you mention James Taylor. My wife and I are going to see him in concert this week.

LENO: James was a few years ahead of me and he was a big star. One day I was sitting in Boston and I thought, “If I stay here, I am going to want to get a nicer apartment, I am going to want to buy a new car, motorcycle, to get a job to get (more highly) paid. I am just going to go to California right now.”

It was the middle of the night. I called the airlines and caught a redeye flight. On the way to the airport, “Sweet Baby James” came on the radio. And there’s the line, “With 10 miles behind me and ten thousand more to go.” That’s what was going through my mind. I’m thinking, “I’m 10 miles from Boston, but I have at least 10,000 miles to go.”

That’s my kind of concert. My idea of a great concert is James Taylor on a stool with an acoustic guitar playing and singing.

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