Jay Leno - Leading with My Chin (1996)

Leading with My Chin by Jay Leno

Johnny Carson survived the workload The Tonight Show required by negotiating his contract to share that load with other hosts. Guest hosts were a weekly expectation, and for the last six years of Carson's tenure, the regular guest host was Jay Leno. With Carson's retirement after 30 years hosting Tonight, NBC chose Leno (famously picked over Late Night host and critical darling David Letterman) to take over the late night institution. Jay Leno has not released a comedy album but did record an audiobook of his 1996 memoir Leading with My Chin published by HarperCollins's HarperAudio. (The book was published by the imprint HarperTorch.)

Jay Leno is adamant that he will never film a comedy special. As a lifetime stand-up road warrior, the potential of reaching millions and getting pennies in return has less value than charging full price from roomfuls of ordinary folks across America. And why give away material to audiences before performing it for them live? That practical mindset is probably why he never released a comedy album either. The closest he came to "giving away" material was through his memoir which he writes (and reads) as a string of humorous stories. They are delivered as if for the hundredth time with the embellishment you'd expect from a story a hundred times told. And by the hundred and first, the punchline still isn't good enough for the act. It's a longer form of storytelling comedy that Leno isn't particularly adept at, and he compensates—in the reading—with silly (unfunny) voices, comic overreactions to make dung heaps out of mole hills, and generally relying on his natural crutch of "louder is funnier."

Half the book is an ode to his parents. He lovingly tells stories about his mother and father and gives performance to their own more subtle and intrapersonal senses of humor. These stories and jokes clearly have sentimental value to Jay and are probably why he wrote the memoir in the first place. Meanwhile, his own life stories always seem to revolve around the remembrance of failed jokes past. He paints himself as a young, working comic who learned the craft the hard way, in front of hostile audiences while staying in seedy hotels, while also managing to not give away any material of financial value. What Jay Leno gives his parents, he denies himself. He might be able to save his routines for the next town, but what he ends up saving for posterity are just bad stories about bad jokes.

Here is Jay Leno's discography:

Jay Leno (1984 comedy routine on the Comedy Tonight compilation album)

Leading with My Chin

'Twas the Night Before Christmas (2000 reading on the NBC Celebrity Christmas compilation album)

Jay Leno's First Appearance on The Tonight Show

The First Episode of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

Jay Leno Interviews a Presidential Candidate in 1999

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