With a schedule that includes over 275 performances a year, Jay Leno, stand-up comedian and many-time host of “The Tonight Show,” doesn’t limit himself to large venues.

One night he might be headlining in Las Vegas and two days later he could be found at a midwestern college like NIU. Unfortunately, the closest Leno will be to NIU this year will be this Saturday night when he takes the stage at the Paramount Arts Centre in Aurora.

The reason Leno gave behind his enormous amount of travelling is quite simple – different audiences. Leno said, “When you’re in a small club, usually it’s rowdy, so you have to be loud, keep it moving, and keep everybody’s attention.

“But when you’re in a big room, like an auditorium, usually you have couples present who are there to hear what you have to say. And as a result, you can tell stories that sometimes are more amusing than belly laughs. You can also do things that are a bit more intricate and take time to set up.”

But before new material is blended into his act, Leno requests the advice of his wife, Mavis Nicholson. “She’s very bright, so if a joke seems intelligent to her,” he said, “that’s good enough for me. I’d rather the joke be intelligent and well thought out than a cheap remark.”

Instead of catering his humor to a select group of people and becoming a part of what Leno described as “the pile of the terminally hip,” he treats the majority.

“If you’re going to do jokes that everybody finds funny, you have to talk about things that everybody knows about. If you’re in a nightclub at 12 o’clock at night, it’s a fairly intimate crowd, and it’s young people, then you talk about things that are unique to that age group.”

Leno said however, that it’s different when you are on TV because “you’ve got to talk about things that everyone understands. If you have to explain the joke, then it’s not funny.”

The subjects in his routines that Leno pokes fun at include: convenience stores, “$20,000 worth of cameras to protect $20 worth of Twinkies,” slasher movies, “Woman opens the refrigerator door, gets hit in the face with an ax. There’s a common household accident, huh?,” and gas station/minimarts.

“They’ve combined the all-night minimart with the all-night service station to try to give you a one stop robbery center. This way, criminals don’t have to drive around all night wasting gas. You pull in at nine-fifteen, shoot the attendant, and you’re in bed by eleven.”

Leno was raised in the Boston suburb of Andover, Massachusetts, the son of an insurance executive, Angelo and his wife, Catherine.

After graduating from Boston’s Emerson College with a degree in speech, Leno worked as a mechanic at a Rolls Royce dealership, and at night he would visit Manhattan comedy clubs to brush up on his material.

In true showbusiness form, Leno frequented many lesser known establishments before earning the visible position as guest host of “The Tonight Show.”

“A guy had seen me working at a stripjoint (telling jokes) and said that he wanted me to play a private party for him and if it worked out, I’d do a lot of them. As it turned out,” Leno said, “this guy ran a bordello.

“It was a double decker, and guys would come in on the first floor and wait to go upstairs.”

Leno said at the time he was 22 years-old and did not realize what was happening. “I walked in and saw a bunch of men with lunch pails staring at the floor. The guy then told me to go in and tell jokes.”

“After three jokes one of the men told me to get out. I ran out the back door and didn’t get paid. These guys,” he said, “looked like they were waiting to go to the urnial. It was horrible.”

When Leno has the leisure time to relax, he can usually be spotted puttering around the garage with his collection of cars, including a 55‘ Buick Roadmaster that he describes as “Mr. Buick, a car so big that it seats seven for dinner,” and his nineteen motorcycles, consisting mainly of antique Vincents and Harley-Davidsons.

When asked if he would ever consider cutting back on his comedic ventures to devote more time to his treasury of cars and motorcycles, Leno replied, “At this point, I’ve been unsuccessful longer than I’ve been successful, and if somebody wants to see what I have to do, it seems rather narcissistic to say I don’t want to do it right now.”

“It’s fun to do comedy, and I really like it,” he said. “I never go out with the attitude that these people are the worst.”

The future for Leno includes “writing jokes that are funny, and letting the future take care of itself. I don’t have some sort of Stalin five year mini-wheat plan,” he said.

If the present is any indicator of the future, it does not seem that Leno will have to resort to the “mini-wheat plan.” The surplus of Leno-humor just is not running low.