Jay Leno

Twenty-one years ago, Jay Leno was one of the younger names on a Las Vegas marquee. Landing the job as Johnny Carson's Monday night guest host gave him the rare cachet to co-headline Caesars Palace while still in his 30s.

Now Leno has become his parents, or at least the modern equivalent of those dependable Vegas vets who once locked down the showrooms.

To get to Leno's show you walk through The Mirage. It wasn't built when the comedian worked Caesars with The Judds in 1987, but now is getting a makeover to battle early aging.

You first pass Jet nightclub, where dark-suited bouncers in headsets wait for the line to form. Then the Revolution lounge, already in full swing.

But you find your way inside the Danny Gans Theatre and it's full of the people who always did come to Las Vegas; the people from middle America, as they usually say, who still buy show tickets. No club kids, but not all retirees either. A fair age range, not surprising for a populist late-night host.

The show starts a little late and not with Leno, but 20 minutes of an a capella quartet, The Alley Cats. They're straight out of Knotts Berry Farm, singing 1950s oldies such as "Blue Moon" and "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."

Then out comes Jay, 58 and in unruly full-gray mane, a year and a half away from handing off "The Tonight Show" to Conan O'Brien. One of his jokes is about Don Imus having to apologize on the Rev. Al Sharpton's radio show. "Who's the head white guy?" he wants to know. "Ron Howard?"

Hmm. Look around, Jay. Take another guess.

Where Leno will go after "The Tonight Show" and what he does next on TV could affect his future ability to pack this room a few weekends per year. But for now, it's an easy ritual.

Most of the act sticks with the light-beer taste of the first joke, which feigns political humor by name-dropping Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but turns into a Michael Jackson gag (choosing between a black man and white woman is a decision he makes every morning).

It's followed by more fish in the barrel: Britney, Mel Gibson, security lines at the airport. The act dances up to the edge of topicality with a line or two about President Bush: He says he has no plans to invade Iran. "He's still going to invade, he just has no plans."

But after 10 minutes, more of it blends into extended routines with a longer shelf life, which Leno can and does perform all around the country.

Men like dogs, women prefer cats and everything women hate about men they love in a cat.

Los Angeles "seems normal while you're living there." But the land of wildfires and earthquakes is the only place you could get eaten by a mountain lion while running from a carjacker.

Domino's introduced its DoubleMelt pizza in 2004, but it's still good for jokes about how fat we are. Leno is at his best with the common-sense outrage, talking about bacon-burgers and the like, which use "meat as a condiment for other meat."

But Leno's act is not so removed from junk food itself. It's not the greatest, but it's steady and there's a lot of it. The jokes are constant, and if few of them bring down the house they at least sustain a chuckle.

Those who arrive for the ticketed starting time are in the theater for a full two hours before Leno expels them at the midnight hour; rare on the Strip where most big tickets have you out the door in 95 minutes.

At the hour mark when many comedians would wrap it up, Leno instead takes a break to chat up the front rows, finding a lot of accountants in the house.

When he goes into the closing routine about his older parents and relatives -- material he's been doing at least since "Sister Act" came out on video in 1993 -- he gets interrupted by a doctor in the crowd who claims to know his Aunt Faye.

Leno, the people's choice, patiently explains, "My Aunt Faye lived in Neptune City, N.J.," then says he has "to go back to work."

If Leno ends up without a TV show in 2010, maybe he'll put more effort into this job. But there's no rush. People aren't tired of it yet.

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