During the final lecture of Lesley’s Boston Speakers Series 2018-19 season on Wednesday, the audience was treated to an evening of lighter fare than usual, with famous comedian and longtime “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno.
During his routine on the Symphony Hall stage, Leno peppered the audience with zippy one-liners, clever wordplay, and a few endearing anecdotes about growing up in Andover, Mass., as the son of a frugal Scottish mother and feisty Italian-American father.
“Let me move my stool,” Leno deadpanned as he strode onto the stage and moved a wooden stool by the microphone. “That sounds terrible, doesn’t it,” he said as the audience roared.
Nothing was off limits as Leno joked about obesity, sexual harassment, colonoscopies, political correctness, pharmaceutical ads, politicians, and much more.
In a style reminiscent of his stand-up comedy and late-night roots, Leno kept a rapid pace, fluidly launching from one joke to the next, poking fun at everything, such as the purported benefits of marijuana to treat hemorrhoids.
“If you think you can treat hemorrhoids with marijuana, somebody is just blowing smoke up your ass,” he quipped as the audience burst into laughter.
He segued immediately into a joke about the late Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s marriage to a woman 65 years his junior.
“She calls it ‘bed panning for gold,’” Leno said. “She said she didn’t even notice the 65-year difference. She didn’t even notice it! She also couldn’t tell the difference between a grape and a raisin.”
Leno, who hosted “The Tonight Show” on NBC for over two decades before retiring in 2014, jokingly lamented the loss of the “macho guy” in movies. He recalled the 1970s crime action film “Shaft” and serenaded the audience with part of the theme song:
“Who’s the black private dick
Who’s a sex machine to all the chicks? Shaft!”
“Now they’re making a new updated ‘Shaft,’” Leno said, “but see, it’s not the ‘Shaft’ you grew up with. We can’t have that Shaft anymore,” he said. So he proposed a politically-correct version of the song:
“Who’s the African-American investigator
Who enjoys having safe, consensual sex with strong, independent women who earn equal pay? Shaft!”
Leno also lampooned the inappropriate and in some cases criminal behavior of high-profile men such as Harvey Weinstein, Anthony Weiner and Matt Lauer.
“Charlie Rose walked around nude in front of interns. When did news men start behaving like this?” Leno posed incredulously. “You never saw Walter Cronkite prancing around before Margaret Thatcher, ‘Take a look at that, Margaret!’”
Leno also turned the jokes around on himself, mainly about aging.
“I don’t miss being on late night. I did it for 22 years and it was a lot of fun. And you have to realize, at some point I shouldn’t have to know all of Jay Z’s music,” he said. “When you’re 40 and you talk to the sexy supermodel, it’s sexy. When you’re 68, you’re the creepy old guy. Maybe flirting with Angela Lansbury I could get away with.”
He recalled that when he was 39, he survived a high-speed motorcycle crash and was back on stage three days later. Last week, at 69, a routine movement caused him agony.
“Something unfair happened,” he started off. “Last Thursday, I’m sitting on my couch. I yawned. And turned my head and Ahhhhhhhh!”
At the close of Leno’s set, he fielded audience questions posed by moderator and WGBH personality Jared Bowen. The Q&A drew out thoughtful responses that opened a small window into Leno’s childhood, his great teachers, his early days as a struggling entertainer and the philosophy behind his humor and his interactions.
In response to a question about the most important human quality, Leno responded “kindness.”
“I don’t understand cruelty,” said Leno. “I’ve never had being mean pay off in a positive way.”
Asked about the greatest book he’s ever read, he offered “A Christmas Carol,” by Charles Dickens.
“It was the first book, certainly of its time, where you could change your life and the life of those around you – you didn’t have to pray, you didn’t have to go somewhere and die, you didn’t get it in another life – your could do it right now (again, going back to kindness) just by treating people decently.”
A car aficionado and collector, Leno now stars in the television show, “Jay Leno’s Garage.” He said he owns 187 cars and 163 motorcycles.
One audience member asked: “Mr. Leno, you have improved my marriage by helping me understand my husband’s passion through ‘Jay Leno’s Garage,’ but can he ever love me as much as his 1963 Continental?”
“No,” quipped Leno.
See more photos from the evening here.
Leno said that he has dyslexia and was encouraged by a teacher to write down his funny stories and read them to the class.
“And for the first time in my life, I really enjoyed doing homework, and I went and I worked on it and read to the class and it got some laughs,” Leno recalled, “and it really made me think I could do something with it.”
He fielded a variety of questions about comedy, and even imparted some serious relationship advice as he spoke lovingly about his wife of 40 years, Mavis Leno, who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her work as chair of the Feminist Majority’s Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls.
“I’m very proud of my wife. I always tell people, you want to marry your conscience,” said Leno. “You want to meet the person you wish you could be. You want to meet the person who has the standards you wish you could set for yourself.”
Leno capped off a wide-ranging array of luminaries who addressed our Boston Speakers Series this season, including former FBI director James Comey, feminist icon Gloria Steinem, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, “Still Alice” author Lisa Genova, Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson and global political analyst Ian Bremmer.
The 2019-20 season will begin on Wednesday, Sept. 25, featuring former U.S. Sen. and Secretary of State John Kerry. See the full schedule of speakers.
