Comedian Jay Leno back in town doing stand-up despite TV drama

Leno chuckles at the almost obsessive news coverage of his NBC talk show drama. About 25 years ago, he explains, his agent at International Creative Management told him he was being dropped because, "You’re not the kind of guy whose name is gonna be in the paper every day."

Now, a month after he was restored to "The Tonight Show" after a radical and failed experiment to air his talk show at 10 p.m., Leno says, "If you’re in the paper for business, there’s nothing you can do about that. I can still go home and look my wife in the eye.

"It’s not drugs, it’s not hookers, it’s not sex with an employee," he says, perhaps a reference to late-night rival David Letterman. "It’s business."

Business has been the operative word in the NBC drama, in which Conan O’Brien was deposed as "The Tonight Show" host to reinstate Leno, after dismal ratings for Leno’s 10 p.m. experiment sparked a revolt by NBC affiliates.

Leno says the furor didn’t hurt the live show he continues to perform at The Mirage one or two weekends each month. His shifting popularity in the press is "a bit like big-time wrestling: They love you, they hate you."

But, he maintains, "It’s really kind of an L.A./New York thing. The rest of the world really doesn’t follow the minutia of this stuff. … Most people I find in the real world, they do kind of get it: Your show’s doing well, you don’t get canceled. It’s not doing well, you get canceled. They understand how the business works.

"Show business is a football," he says. "Whoever controls the ball controls the game. Brett Favre is 40. He shouldn’t be playing. But he is, and he’s still one of the best quarterbacks. You do it until you get beat and they kick your ass. That’s the way it works.

"That makes perfect sense to me. If you’re a boxer, you don’t call the fight before the person gets in the ring. You get in the ring and if you get knocked out, you lose. If the other person gets knocked out, you win."

Leno, who turns 60 on April 28, says he would have preferred those simple rules back in 2004, when the network announced its succession plan of Leno’s handing off "The Tonight Show" to O’Brien in five years.

The only flaw in the long-range vision was that Leno’s ratings were still so strong, the network opted to move Leno into prime time, which was seen as both a cost-cutting move and a way to keep him from competing on another network.

"They made a bad decision in 2004, and it kind of follows through," Leno says. But he went along with it. "I thought, they’ve already made this deal, I’m not gonna bitch and moan about it. I’ll be a good sport and say I’m retiring. Anybody who knows me knows I don’t retire, but OK, that’s fine."

He says he proposed an alternative: "The minute I drop to No. 2, why don’t you fire me?"

They didn’t want to do that then, but he’s fine if those rules hold now. "If we fall, and we get kicked off, perfect. That’s exactly the way it’s supposed to be. Nobody’s looking for any favors. As long as you’re holding up your end, you’ve got the job. That’s the way these things work."

Leno has been a Las Vegas headliner since 1987, and he has been at The Mirage since 2003. It sounds funny in light of his TV travails, but Leno doesn’t seem to be going for a laugh when he says, "I like having a home. I don’t like a lot of change."

The Mirage shows scheduled through October are only a small part of the 160 public and private dates Leno still performs each year.

"I’ve always been a stand-up comedian who happened to have a TV show. I look at my life that way," he says. "I live on the money I make as a comic, and I like being a comic. No matter what happens on TV, I can always go out and make a living."

But he also likes to commute to California. "I haven’t spent a night in Vegas in probably 20 years. If you’re gonna be in this business and you want to stay married, you go home every night."

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.