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Jay Leno's NPR Interview - Is He Crazy?

G

Gregg.

NPR's Fresh Air recently replayed an interview with Jay Leno from about 15 years ago. (Fresh Air devoted this past week to Late Night TV, with replays of interviews with Letterman, Kimmel, Conan, even Johnny Carson's longtime producer Fred DeCordova.) Host Terry Gross asks about writing the monologue. Jay responds...

--They tape the show each weeknight from 5 to 6.
--He meets with his writers after the show to discuss tomorrow's monologue.
--He gets home around 9pm.
--He gets a call from his head writer around 11pm and they discuss 400 or 500 jokes, or ideas for jokes.
--He has around half of tomorrow's monologue written by 2 or 3am.
--He gets into work around 8:30am and during the day they're adding and subtracting jokes.
--It's finally ready just before they start taping the next show.

If this timetable is true, Leno is crazy. He only sleeps four hours per night? He discusses HUNDREDS of jokes with his head writer at 11pm, which would mean he doesn't watch that night's monologue? (Wouldn't it take at least 400 to 500 minutes to discuss 400 to 500 jokes? That's more than 7 hours.) Even though he has a staff of professional writers, he still needs to put ALL THIS TIME into a 10 minute monologue? He's at work by 8:30am for a 5pm taping? He's at the studios more than 10 hours a day plus he's up all night writing?

If it's not really true, Jay is crazy for inflating it.

Leno has talked in the past about his father instilling in him an ethic that if you work harder than everyone else, you'll go further than everyone else. But his father is not here anymore. And even if Jay works a little harder than Letterman or other late night hosts, does he have to overstate his depiction of it?

What's he going to do when Jimmy Fallon takes over and he isn't working 11 hour days and staying up all night writing jokes?
 
So let me get this straight: working hard is a bad thing? What you call crazy, others call successful, and Leno's results bear that out. Some people just like to work, and if you're making a living at doing what you really love to do, then it isn't really work, is it? BTW - lots of people do just fine on 4 hours sleep per night - myself included. And I doubt they average one minute discussion time per joke.
 
Maybe he could join our party here.... and become addicted to conversation on RadioDiscussions???
 
If I was going to get the money Jay gets for sleeping four hours a week, heck, I'll start going on two hours sleep and give myself a raise!
 
Jay lies.
He probably gets even less sleep when he's busy figuring out how to steal shows from people and how to stab somebody in the back. Or when he's hacking phone calls.
 
Now I know why he takes so much time off. However, I'm sure he cat naps during the day.
 
Soooo....we're commenting on a 15 year interview with Leno just as he's getting ready to leave The Tonight Show? Well, OK, I guess. Leno's always been known as a hard-worker. He was a real sea-change from his late (and more talented, IMO) predecessor - Johnny Carson, who was finally working a 3 day week the last few years, and not that many weeks per year, either. When Leno is on "vacation" from Tonight, he's usually performing somewhere. I suspect that he won't want to rest on his laurels after this, and will either begin a show on another network, produce TV shows, or step up his schedule of live performances, at the least.

Also, unlike Carson who was married 3 times, IIRC - Jay has been married to his wife Mavis for 33 years. She's described as a "philantropist," and I would imagine she is able to do that with his money. I've never been a big fan of Leno, but you have to admire his work ethic and loyalty.
 
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Loyalty to whom? Not to David Letterman who promoted Leno early on and whom Leno then stabbed in the back.

There is nothing to admire about Leno.

Fresh Air also played a very early interview with Letterman, who went out of his way back then to say nice things about Leno.
 
Yeah, maybe. I always tended to give Leno a pass on that one. And yes, I watched The Late Shift, the TV movie that was not particularly kind to Jay.

Show business is tough and competitive, and Leno used his influence to get the iconic Tonight Show slot. I don't blame him for the Conan fiasco either. Even though I'm a Conan fan, NBC was the guilty party, and O'Brien's Tonight Show did not shine - his TBS show is far superior. All Leno did was bail out of a bad situation he was forced into (The Jay Leno Show) by stupid network suits, and take his old show back.
 
If you compare Carson to any other TV comedian of his day he was a very hard worker. And, like other comedians of his day, he had a giant ego. Neither of these traits is necessarily a bad thing. Many people have had multiple marriages (I am one and so is my wife). My parents had only one marriage but argued and fought like cats and dogs. Is that better than taking a chance on somebody else you get along with?

Having said that I also have to admit I was not a big Carson fan. I liked Johnny's interview technique and it was only in comparison to Jay and the other late night wanna-be's that made him an icon in my eyes. Jay comes off as a smokey night club stand-up and his "guests" seem to be there only to promote their latest projects which is not entertaining to me. Letterman comes across as a dirty old man and Conan had so very little talent there must have been an acute shortage of comedians to have considered him.
 
Carson was an outstanding interviewer - much better than the so-called "journalists" who usually do interviews. He didn't have the pretense that journalists have. He did interviews as a regular guy with a general curiosity about things. He was interested in the guest and he asked interested questions. In contrast to journalists who try to show how smart they are and tend to ask interesting questions. As a comedian, Johnny knew how to take the role of straight man and let somebody else get the laugh. In the same vein, Johnny was willing to make the interview subject look good. When the Tonight Show was cut back to an hour, we didn't get to see much of Johnny the interviewer, which was a shame.

Right now, everybody is saying what a great interviewer David Frost was. His problem as I see it was again trying to show what a great interviewer he was and what great questions he could ask. As a result, he was nowhere near as good as Johnny.

Steve Allen also tended to want to show how smart he was. Jack Parr didn't really do interviews but he was a brilliant conversationalist and a lot of good stuff came out in those on-air conversations. Parr had conversations with a lot of really smart people without trying to show how smart he was (in contrast to Dick Cavett).

Terry Gross is mostly a good interviewer, although some topics cause her to relapse into the grade school teacher she used to be.
 
Fred: You played two words up against each other: interview and conversation. Is a great interview a great conversation... or are they really two different things? Or just different styles of the person conducting the "oral interchange"?
 
A conversation is about both (all) participants. An interview is - or should be - all about the subject. Of course, too many hack broadcasters and ego-centric "journalists" can't stand that and keep finding ways to draw attention off the subject and back to themselves.
 
You haven't "made a sale" with me yet with that response. A conversation is lot limited to talking about the participants. A conversation can be about a topic. A conversation can be about an event that has just happened.

An interview can be about THE participant. Are you running for office? Are you disappointed in the limits the board has put on your authority? Now that the funding for this project has been assured, what actions do you hope to include in the project.

I am puzzled by your sourness over journalists. Is poor journalism always an indictment of the skills and motives of THE JOURNALIST, or do we need to look deeper and find out what job description has been pushed upon the journalist by his/her employer/patron?
 
Agreed with most of those comments, FredLeonard. At the risk sounding picky - it's Jack Paar, not Parr.

landtuna - wasn't making a moral judgment regarding multiple marriages, just commenting on the differences between Carson and Leno. If you look over the past 40 years, I've been in multiple relationships as well, though being an old hippie - I've tending to avoid the 'marriage thing.' I wasn't criticized Carson's work ethic either - just commenting on differences: if you compare Carson's last decade and a half - possibly longer - to Leno's - Jay works much more often.
 
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