Leno leaves 'Tonight' much as he found it

Unlike many comedians, Leno is not the subject of his own comedy but rather a kind of stand-in for his audience. "What were you thinking?" he asked Hugh Grant, coming on the show after being arrested with a prostitute back in 1995. (Grant's appearance helped establish the late-night talk show appearance stint as a way to snatch a career back from the jaws of scandal.) But the question "What were you thinking?" is the very essence of Leno's comedy, which lives in the space between the way things are and the way they ought to be. His signature bits on "The Tonight Show" were both about that kind of failure: "Headlines" (unintentionally funny clippings from newspapers and magazines) and "Jaywalking" (people in the street demonstrate what they don't know). They are sure to migrate with him when he moves into prime time.

"No one's really bummed out or sad, because we're going to be back in the fall," Leno said Monday night. He leaves "The Tonight Show," from which he has been in a sense forcibly retired, in a position of remarkable standing. In a move to keep him from going to ABC or Fox to compete head-to-head against O'Brien -- much as NBC earlier kept O'Brien in the fold by promising him "The Tonight Show" -- the network has given him nearly a quarter of its prime-time schedule. His new show will run weeknights at 10 nearly year-round.

Things are less secure in prime time than in late night, to be sure; there are no five-year contracts there. But the move doesn't so much pull Leno from late night as, potentially, redefine when "late night" begins -- there may be an aging audience only too happy to get news and a talk show and still be in bed by 11:30. If he's successful there, other networks may well follow suit.

O'Brien will then be left to attract younger viewers with his younger, stranger attitude -- though he's 46 now, four years older than Leno was when he took over "The Tonight Show." It remains to be seen whether this new arrangement might work to O'Brien's disadvantage -- the two shows will be in competition for the guests and O'Brien's will still be the show that comes on after Leno's. But as opposed to Leno's arrival at "The Tonight Show," which ruined his friendship with Letterman, the current hand-over is being staged as a love fest.

That O'Brien was to be Leno's final "Tonight Show" guest, crowning a week that focused on longtime friends, including Leno's first guest, Billy Crystal; Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had announced his candidacy on the show and whom Leno has imitated broadly and often; and Gibson, whose ongoing divorce and pregnant girlfriend gave Leno a last Hugh Grant moment: "Can I ask you, what happened?"

Perhaps it is just the performer's fear that every gig is potentially the last, but Leno -- who didn't take a sick day from his show until this April and who, to the displeasure of the Writers Guild of America, wrote his own monologues when "The Tonight Show" returned to the air during last year's writers strike -- is not about to relax. He'll be onstage tonight in Atlantic City, N.J., with June dates in Las Vegas and Rancho Mirage. And there is a new show to make.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com