THE ‘80s A Special Report :...

It took a long time for Johnny Carson and NBC to come up with a successor to The Tonight Show chair. There was a real constituency to consider, one that reached from the urban coasts to the heartland, to whom the show performed the ritual function of smoothing out the tensions of the workaday world like bedsheets. They needed someone sharp enough to put things in comedic perspective and amiable enough to leave an audience comfortably on the threshold of sleep. Jay Leno took to the job so well that he seemed the most natural choice in the world.

Leno was so singleminded about his career in the mid-’70s that he was willing to sleep on the steps behind the Comedy Store (occasionally a sympathetic cop would buy him coffee and doughnuts). Nothing about the current ease and apparent freshness of his act now reveals the dogged and meticulous years he spent assembling the elements of comedy presentation.

The memory of hard times in an individual often goes a long way towards taking the measure of current success, but it can work the other way too, making one pig out on celebrity. Leno’s topical skepticism is tonic, as is his coverage of the ways in which we’re manipulated and exploited by advertising, the media, and some of the people we place in public trust. He has an eye for the preposterous within the everyday. He uses language and imagery well. He works clean.

Mostly, he has a realistic perspective on what it means to be an entertainer--he knows the traps as well as the trappings of success. That’s why he’s out on the road when he could just as well stay home poolside. He’s one of the few major comedians on the scene who hasn’t had his work ethic retrofitted around a world of show-biz values.

The Taste Makers project was edited by David Fox, assistant Sunday Calendar editor.