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He is sensitive to criticism that he has watered down his political jokes since becoming heir apparent at the Tonight show. He thinks people are less open to political humor than they once were. "Can you do a joke about abortion, pro or con? Any number of issues are now colored by political correctness. Plus, people don't really keep up with the news. Nobody knows Tsongas' economic program, or anybody else's. Can you get an audience interested in the S&Ls, in the Keating trial?" Leno never wants to seem as if he knows more than the folks in his audience, but he sometimes seems disappointed that they do not know enough.
Comedians often claim that an unhappy childhood is a prerequisite to being funny. But Jamie Leno, as he was known, was a funny, happy kid. His father Angelo Leno, the son of Italian immigrants, worked as an insurance salesman ("The funniest guy in the office," Leno says), and his mother Catherine Muir, who emigrated to America from Scotland when she was 12, was a good- natured stickler for honesty and proper manners. Even now, Leno often seems to be the last good son in America, worrying about offending his folks, checking on them almost daily.
Leno was no scholar. His fifth-grade teacher, Earl Simon, wrote the following on his spring report card: "If James used the effort toward his studies that he uses to be humorous, he'd be an A student. I hope he never loses his talent to make people chuckle." Leno was always the wisenheimer with the heart of gold.
He didn't like sports, especially football. "It's not in my nature to knock people down," he says. He knocked them down with humor instead. In his senior year in high school, he was working at McDonald's when he entered the company's Northeast talent show and won. That got him thinking. "Until then," he says, "I just always thought I'd be a funny salesman."
By the time he was a sophomore at Emerson College in Boston, he was driving down to New York City on weekends to perform at comedy clubs. From the beginning, Leno was always the gym rat of comedians, the guy who practiced long after everyone else had gone home. After graduating, he worked at strip joints, rock concerts, coffeehouses, Playboy clubs. He delights in recounting his knocks far more than his successes: how lighted cigarettes were flicked at him at the Revere Beachcomber, how he found a manager in the Yellow Pages (who then tried to make him into a wrestler who told jokes), how he sometimes slept in the alley near the Improvisation in New York.
By the time he moved to California in 1974, his comedy had evolved from telling jokes to telling stories -- stories about how his mother could never master the VCR, how his father wouldn't say the name of the James Bond movie Octopussy ("Octo-what, Dad?"), stories about the minutiae of everyday life. He became part of the school of observational comics like Robert Klein, George Carlin and Richard Pryor.
Around the same time, he met Mavis Nicholson at the Comedy Store in Hollywood. Cool and cerebral, the daughter of a Bohemian California actor (not Jack), Nicholson was an aspiring writer who read far more than she wrote; she still devours 10 books a week. "I don't make wife jokes," Leno points out. He may be the first comedian since George Burns who could be described as uxorious.