Catching Up with Jay Leno

He’s hardly the first celebrity to call Rhode Island home, but he may be the most visible. Newport’s funniest part-time resident shows no signs of slowing down. More than a decade after stepping away from The Tonight Show, Jay Leno remains as busy as ever. The award-winning comedian still performs more than 100 live shows each year, hosts his popular YouTube series Jay Leno’s Garage, and devotes time to caring for his wife, Mavis.

When he’s not on the road, Leno enjoys life at Seafair, the oceanside estate he purchased in 2017, marking a return to his New England roots. Around Newport, he’s become a familiar face – performing at the Newport Playhouse, helping raise funds for the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center, and regularly hosting the Audrain Newport Concours and Motor Week. He’s even filmed segments of Jay Leno’s Garage around the city.

Leno, who grew up in Andover, Massachusetts, still thrives on stage. His comedy style remains refreshingly old-school – broadly relatable, deliberately avoiding the political edge that often dominates modern stand-up. And he makes no apologies for it. “It’s stand-up comedy,” says Leno. “I’ve kind of taken politics out and just try to do comedy. You’re not going to change anybody’s opinion. Rodney Dangerfield and I were close friends for 40 years, and I have no idea if he was a Republican or a Democrat. When we got together, it was just funny – that’s what we did. We’d just throw jokes back and forth. When people come to a comedy show, they want to get away from everything.”

This spring, Leno is hitting the road co-headlining a tour with fellow late-night legend Arsenio Hall, including a stop at Foxwoods Resort Casino. The pairing brings together two comics who were once framed as rivals during the 1990s. Leno chuckles at the memory. “Arsenio and I have been friends for a long time,” he says. “It was funny when they called it the ‘late-night wars.’ There really was no war.”

The two comedians now enjoy touring together, swapping stories and testing new material on the road. Hall is publishing a memoir, which Leno says includes plenty of shared history. “Arsenio’s got a really good book coming out about his life,” he says. “There are a lot of stories about the two of us in there. It’s fun being on the road together. We try stuff out on each other. The idea that comedians are battling each other isn’t really true. The only people who truly understand what you do is another comedian.”

Leno’s reputation as a regular guy is more evident offstage. Around Newport, he’s known for chatting with locals at events and car shows – often about engines rather than entertainment. “I play the exact same person on TV that I am in real life, so it’s easy,” he says. “When people come up and say, ‘Hey Jay, can I ask you about my ’65 Mustang?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure,’ because that’s what I like to talk about. Even when I was doing The Tonight Show, I could observe show business without being immersed in it. I could be around all the craziness without paying any price for it.”

He also says he’s particularly fond of what he calls the “New England compliment.” “There’s nothing funnier to me,” Leno says with a grin. “I was in Rhode Island recently, and a guy comes up and says, ‘Jay, my friend met you in California. He said you’re not an a******.’ I said, ‘Oh, thanks.’ And he goes, ‘No, really, he said that.’” For Leno, that kind of blunt honesty is part of what makes returning to New England feel like home.

For Leno, the conversation always pivots back around to cars. “When you’re in California, you meet half a dozen guys who each have 100 cars,” he says. “In New England, you meet a guy who has one car, and he’s had it since high school, and he’s going to restore it when his kids go off of college.” That difference, Leno says, captures something essential about the region. “It’s that kind of thing that’s hard to define, but it’s real.”  Follow Jay Leno’s Garage on YouTube @jaylenosgarage.