Jay Leno: The best advice I received from Johnny Carson | Trending Now

On now hand you over to my best man, Eddie. Wow, wow, wow! Second time's a charm, eh, Billy Boy? Oh, God. Substitution could see a Paddy Power embarrassing Eddie makes way for sensible Samuel. Cool, that was close. You might not always pick the right starter, but your sub can still deliver. Because with Paddy's Super Sub, your bet rolls over to the player coming on. Paddy Power. Validant, selected leagues and markets only. Pre-match and in-play bets on qualifying player outcome selections only. T-Series and exclusions apply at 18plus.com. Hey guys, Graham here. It's Friday, which means we get to share with you another one of our most popular clips from a past interview. What you're about to listen to is trending this week on our Facebook page. Hope you enjoy. Take me to everything you recall from the moment Johnny Carson walks into the LA Improv and then going up to his table at the end of the night. Johnny, he was a comedian and he liked comedians. One day he said, look, you're a funny guy, but your jokes are a little weak. And he says, here what you do. Write your joke out like a three by five card or something. Read it as flatly and as boring as you possibly can. If it gets a laugh, then you know you got a funny joke. Now, take your performing skills, the character of, hey, what's that, Bob? You know, whatever it is. And apply that. Now you have a joke that works on two fronts. It's physically funny and it's verbally funny. That was the best advice I ever got from Johnny. What stands out to you most from your first appearance on Carson? Well, just the fact he got through it OK. I was going to say, when I interviewed Seinfeld, what he remembered most was just the abject terror to use his words. No, I didn't have that. I've been fortunate in that way. I don't really get nervous or anything. Or like, oh, God, who are these people? I'll tell you the best example of that was ours at the White House with Reagan. How long ago it was. I'm standing backstage and this general comes back. He's got all the things. Hey, you're a comedian? Come here. You understand who that is, right? That's my commander in chief. That is the president of the United States. You don't make fun of him. You don't delegate him. Death to him. He's poking me, you know? I'll go, well, I'm a comedian. Oh, I don't care. I don't care. He's my boss. He's president of the United States. And he leaves. OK. I'm thinking, oh, man, I got to change my. What am I going to do here? And then what was his name? Schultz? Yeah, George Schultz. George Schultz come back. And he's got a drink. And he's like, hey, he goes, let him out. You get out there. You nail Ronnie's ass to the wall. And I go, well, that guy said, that guy works for me. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Now, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. But I remember the jokes that got a big laugh from Reagan. Well, as I said, I want to congratulate Nancy Reagan on being named humanitarian of the year. I'm glad she beat out that conniving little bitch, Mother Teresa. And Reagan, well, he fell off the chair. And I went, oh, OK, I'm in. I'm in now. I'm in now. So you appear in Carson a number of times. But one thing that seemed to happen for comedians, and Seinfeld talked a little bit about this as well, that he would always see comics blow their best material on their first appearance. And then their second one was a little worse. But there was a lucky after that. The next one was a little worse. And the same thing, as I understand, kind of happened to you. That happened to me, yeah. All of a sudden, you weren't invited back. Well, you get a call every couple of weeks. And Johnny's material is different than Dave. With Dave, you could take a chance and be a little rude, or, as the title was, a different animal. But yeah, that's true. Because they would call you. Can you do it next week? And you didn't want to say no. So you quickly put something together. So what do you do then when all of a sudden that call doesn't come again? Well, you do it, and you hope it goes OK. And it didn't. A couple of shots were not particularly strong. But for a lot of comedians, that's kind of it. But you kind of pivot in a way. Well, I mean, I worked a lot. And you try to just get better. And you can't at home run every time. Well, some people can. Every time you get it bad. But yeah, but there were other shows, too. There was Murph Griffin. There was Douglas or all these other programs. You could do, you know, Waitland Flowers and Madame had a show. I mean, I did every show. How many in this show? You know, the interesting thing is, you always get more work from other comedians than you'll ever get from agents or managers. What? You know, people think it's a horrible cutthroat business. It's really not. I mean, Steve Martin brought Johnny Carson in to see me. Soda Harvey Corman brought him in again to see me. Because as a comedian, you can't play every gig every day all the time. There's enough work out there. I remember Simon Fowler one day saying, what if we went on vacation and we liked it? Then we're screwed, instead of working. But I mean, he and I will tell you this, nothing better than being on stage. It really is far superior to anything else. You know, go on vacation or you can do a show. I'll do a show, you know. And now you get paid for it, you know. You had in your head back then that everybody goes on vacation, right? So when somebody goes, that could be your opportunity to get another gig. Well, my life is a vacation. I mean, when you have to go to Hawaii for three days, that's a vacation. I mean, you're working, ooh, an hour, ooh, an hour a day. You know, that's all the work you're doing. So when I say I don't take vacations, but I go to vacation places all the time on somebody else's dime, which is the way to do it really. That's the best way to do it. So it's not like, oh, I don't go on vacation because I'm working. It's just that my work happens to be this. You know, I mean, it's not fair that the worst comedian in the world makes five times the money of the best teacher. You know, it seems very unfair, but that's the way it is. And oh, okay, I'll take it. You know, one of the benefits of the job is it pays pretty well if you're any good at it. And it's really the only measure of if you're any good enough. How much people will they pay to see, you know, so. As always, thanks for listening. To see more trending clips from my team, go to youtube.com slash Graham Bensinger.