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Each Monday night, Leno meets with several of his writers at his rather gloomy mock-Tudor house in Beverly Hills to piece together the Tonight show monologue. The sessions begin at 11 and usually run till 4 a.m. On one recent occasion the group that gathered around his kitchen table consisted of Jimmy Brogan, pale, scholarly-looking, wearing a blue baseball cap, a stand-up comedian admired by other comedians; Ron Richards, also a comedian, wry and pleasant; and Chuck Martin, a young stand-up and the only one not on Leno's payroll, sitting in like a rookie playing...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Jay Leno: Midnight's Mayor | 3/16/1992 | See Source »

...Leno, in his usual non-Tonight show uniform of blue jeans, blue-jean shirt and cowboy boots, held a thick wad of index cards on which were written jokes supplied by him and various writers. Propping his boots up on the table, he read in a deadpan voice, "With all the controversy about silicone breast implants, a lot of women are changing to saltwater implants. They're a lot safer, but the trouble is, some women have noticed barnacles growing on them." Smirks all around. "Barnacles -- great comedy word," said Martin. Brogan, not sure the joke was in good taste...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Jay Leno: Midnight's Mayor | 3/16/1992 | See Source »

...joke made the cut. Many others fell short. (Leno: "The economy is so bad that Domino's is delivering pizzas one slice at a time." Brogan: "A little corny." Leno: "Corny? Gone.") By 3:30, they had whittled the selections to 21. Leno took out a microcassette recorder and read the jokes into the machine. The tape came in at five minutes 22 seconds. Bingo. Leno nodded: "Anything between four and six minutes is fine...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Jay Leno: Midnight's Mayor | 3/16/1992 | See Source »

Freud said that all humor is displaced anger, but that is news to Leno. "I was never angry," he says. "I could never relate to comedians like Lenny Bruce." But beneath Leno's "What, me worry?" exterior, there does lurk a subterranean anger. "It's so stupid," he says, uttering this phrase perhaps 20 times a day, pronouncing the word "stew-pid." He sees a newspaper ad describing a knife as "perfect for a night out on the town." He shakes his head. "It's so stew-pid." Small-mindedness irks him; he can tolerate anything but intolerance...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Jay Leno: Midnight's Mayor | 3/16/1992 | See Source »

...Leno is the most political of the late-night hosts. When he says, "Pat Buchanan is the thinking man's David Duke," he says it to be funny, yes, but he means it. Although he rejects the notion that his humor is political -- "Political implies ideological, and my comedy is not ideological" -- Leno is a liberal in two senses: with a small l in that his sensibility is humane and broad-minded (last month he went to Chicago and Detroit at his own expense to do free shows for the unemployed and the homeless); with a capital L in that...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Jay Leno: Midnight's Mayor | 3/16/1992 | See Source »

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