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Review by Clay Stafford
The road to success is paved with many dirt byways and garbage-can-filled alleys, according to Jay Leno. From homelessness to revered replacement of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, Leading with My Chin is a story of naked persistence and honesty.
Leno takes his comedy seriously, but never himself. He offers his scars with grace and always with a laugh. It's fun to read about Leno's early years with fellow "nobodies" Robin Williams, David Letterman, Freddy Prinze, and Andy Kaufman (to name a few). No amount of success seems worth the experiences Leno encountered, but he appears to have lived through each in the same way he writes this book: one joke at a time.
Written in easy-to-read vignettes (the longest being about four pages), the reader is given a shotgun pellet history of the young man from Andover, Massachusetts, who would do anything not to fail in life or bomb onstage. As with many artists, his family is still waiting for him to get a real job.
Written with Bill Zehme (Esquire), this book is more than a collection of funny memoirs, it is a send-up of a career and life still in the making.
Clay Stafford is a writer living in Franklin, TN.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.