Jay Leno walked into his neighborhood Whole Foods Market in Los Angeles last week and asked a young employee: “Do you have Kellogg’s sugar Frosted Flakes?”
“He goes, ‘No man, we don’t sell those. You know it’s because of the sugar; sugar’s bad for you so we don’t have those’,” Leno recounted. “I said, ‘OK. Alright.’”
“And as I leave, he goes, ‘We have the regular Frosted Flakes. We don’t have the sugar Frosted Flakes, but we have the regular Frosted Flakes.’ ‘You know something, I think that will be OK. You think the Frosted Flakes are better?’ ‘Well yeah because the other ones have a lot of sugar in it and these are just Frosted Flakes.’ ‘OK, give me a box of the Frosted Flakes’.”
It was then that two things dawned on the former king of late night celebrity chat: That young man was a master of marketing; and Leno missed so much during the 22 years he hosted NBC’s “The Tonight Show.”
“When you do a TV show every day, you tend to get isolated and you get all your information from everybody else,” he explained. “But when you go outside … you just have encounters that are funny, just odd.”
Since leaving the show in February, Leno has had plenty of funny encounters, from the Frosted Flakes sales pitch to the stagehand in Israel who tried to substitute figs for a Coke with ice.
“And that’s what you miss because … I would get to the studio quarter to 8 in the morning and you’re there until 7 or 8 o’clock at night every day and you don’t have these funny encounters,” he said.
Leno brings his stand-up show to Centennial Hall Saturday to open UApresents’ 2014-15 season.
We caught up with him last week to talk about life after “The Tonight Show,” his CNBC show “Jay Leno’s Garage” set to debut next year and getting back to stand-up.
It was time to go: “Look, you have to know when your time is up. When you’re 42 years old and you’re talking to a 25-year-old supermodel, it’s fun and sexy. When you’re 64 and talking to a 25-year-old supermodel, now you’re the creepy old guy. And when they mention a Jay-Z song and you don’t know what they’re talking about, it’s time to move on. There’s nothing worse than guys my age pretending to know all the pop music and everything. It’s like, ‘Oh, shut up!’ You have to live your age.”
Bow out while you’re still on top: “Everybody who left ‘The Tonight Show’ left when it was No. 1. … You don’t want to be No. 2 or No. 3 and walk out with your tail between your legs.”
Loving the stand-up life: “I have to say I really enjoy being a comedian again. It’s really fun just going out on the road. Before I couldn’t hang out. When I would play Atlantic City, I would fly out Saturday morning, do the show and fly back out Saturday night and get back at 4:30 in the morning because I had to go to work Sunday and write jokes. I went there recently and I met a bunch of comics, went out to eat and hung out and told jokes and exchanged material. It was fun. It was stuff I wasn’t able to do when I was doing the show. When I was doing ‘The Tonight Show,’ you have to write jokes every single day.”
Same joke, different stage: “The fun thing about doing ‘The Tonight Show’ is you tell new jokes in the same place every night. And when you’re on the road you tend to tell the same jokes in different places every night. … When you’re on the road, you can try a joke out on Monday, hone it on Tuesday.”
Back on TV in primetime: “It is definitely not ‘The Tonight Show.’ It’s different. … I get a little tired of these car shows where people yell at each other and throw tools and you build a car in a week. It’s a little more measured approach, maybe a little more history about the vehicles. … We try to explain to people how cars work because a lot of kids now, if your dad didn’t know how to use a screwdriver you probably don’t. I come from the generation where my dad knew how to fix a car when it broke and then he passed it on to me. Parents don’t do that anymore. Cars are a bit like refrigerators; it runs until it doesn’t run and then you get another one.”
