Jay Leno: An Appreciation

Whatever you think of Jay Leno’s comedy—and to my mind the commercial dictates of late-night mass culture made him less interesting as he got more popular—one thing is certain: he has now become one of America’s indispensable public historians. To those who only know him as a comedian, you may not know that Jay Leno possesses one of the world’s great car collections. And he’s got the historical and engineering chops to put his incredible collection into engaging context.

Few social, cultural, technological, and commercial developments stand more central to modern American history than the automobile. The automobile not only revolutionized transportation, shrinking forbidding distance into minor inconvenience, it also revolutionized time, turning weeks into days and days into hours. Americans’ conceptions of what is possible, what is an obligation and what is a duty, what constitutes fun and what makes for drudgery, were transformed by the automobile.
 
But the car was also so much more than that.
 
The car transformed our ideas about recreation, about social etiquette, and how we should spend our leisure time. The car defined work time from leisure time. The car marked social class and social standing, and presented new pressures of social emulation and new possibilities for self-expression. It revolutionized our commercial lives—how we produce, how we market to each other, and how we buy and sell: think about the American factory system, and our credit system, to name just two examples, of the nearly-infinite knock-on transformations of the auto industry. We work, we play, we eat, we socialize, all differently in the twentieth century than we did in the nineteenth, and the automobile is as much responsible for that as anything.
 
Leno owns over 300 cars and motorcycles, plus related artifacts such as steam engines and vintage fighter plane engines. He was always interested in cars and began to collect early in his career. He parlayed his television success into a massive working garage/warehouse complex where the collection is stored, restored, reconditioned, maintained, and displayed. He has for years detailed the collection in a YouTube channel that offers twenty- to thirty-minute deep dives into select artifacts. “Jay Leno’s Garage” is the name of his video line, but it is also a place which employs artisans and craftsmen who repair, maintain, and most of all, preserve the artifacts. And what is being preserved is not just rich-guy toys, but a lineage of global engineering, design, manufacturing, and retailing history. Leno’s collection includes its fair share of exotic supercars, such as his 1955 Mercedes 300SL Gullwing. But he also appreciates the roles cars have played in our lives, and he is as likely to profile a station wagon as a Jaguar XKE.
 
Of course the collection includes its fair share of exotic Lamborghini, Porsche, MacLaren (perhaps his favorite badge) and Aston Martin supercars (he is not a big fan of Ferrari.) But he is just as likely to feature work-a-day cars from the 1950s and 60s for which he maintains a nostalgic soft-spot (like his Dad’s 1966 Ford Galaxie), esoteric experiments like his 1938 Tatra T87, or fun mid-century exuberations-in-chrome like his Packards and Cadillacs. He has a soft spot for engineering innovation, and for that reason frequently highlights his Duesenbergs or his extensive collection of British motorcycles. And there is no particular bias for luxury: some of his favorites are old steam-driven cars like his various Stanley Steamers or his several Whites and Dobles.
 
Indeed, one of the truly remarkable aspects of his video presentations is his familiarity with the engineering and technology. One of my favorite episodes is his careful step-by-step (and there are a LOT of steps!) explanations of how one operates a 1906 Stanley Steamer Vanderbilt Cup Racer. Watching Leno patiently and carefully explain how to fire and operate a boiler-powered car is a college course itself. He speaks with great knowledge about the evolution of carburetors, transmissions, and cylinder heads. Some of his favorite cars in the collection are engineering experiments or one-offs, such as his 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado or his 1963 Chrysler Turbine—a real life jet car. He has a keen sense for innovation and the men (usually men), operating out of a garage with little more than a wrench, turning dream into reality.
 
Leno is not a trained historian but he does have a sense of how important the automobile has been, and its endless relevance to American social, political, and cultural history, consumer and economic history, environmental history, geopolitics, and art and aesthetic design. The depth here may not appease experts in these respective fields, but as an entrée point to discussing deeper twentieth century history, there can’t be many better.
 
Th cars and the engineering are the star, but there is a subtext, which is the human element. Many of his YouTube episodes feature unique, interesting, and innovative cars lovingly restored by others. He is regular enthusiast and promoter of American car clubs and amateur associations and brings many of these fellows into his garage to showcase their passions. Whatever you think of Leno’s comedy, he is a good interviewer, honed by years of mining vapid celebrity interviews for television gold. Despite being arguably the most famous (and one of the wealthiest) car guys in the nation, Leno is fascinated by the stories of ordinary people who express their love and passion through their vehicles. His interviews are often as compelling as the vehicles themselves. He understands the love for, and identity with, cars that people maintain. Leno is also genuinely interested in the artisanship and expertise of his guests. He is concerned to hear about knowledge and skills, how those are passed on from mentor to apprentice, and how a lifetime spent in shops and garages adds up to passion, tradition, and generational connection points. What he shows is not merely engineering and technical development, but the story of people and the things that define them.
 
Leno has amassed a genuine knowledge of automotive and motorcycle engineering and design history. He understands how the dictates of the marketplace often clash with the preferences of the engineers, and he takes pains to highlight those conflicts. He has an encyclopedic recall of processes and technologies, and also of the designers, many obscure, who provided the vision and labor behind the artifacts he now maintains. In so doing he not only honors that work but preserves it for future generations.
 
Few industries have been as consequential to world—and certainly American—history as the automotive industry. Very few individuals possess either the resources or the expertise to be able to illuminate so many aspects of that industry as Jay Leno. As climate change increasingly mandates the extinction of the internal combustion engine, Leno is a good reminder that the passion, expertise, and energy that drives many people’s historic interest in automobiles will need to be rechanneled into other productive enterprises and hobbies.
 
Take or leave his comedy, but give the man props as one of our most essential public historians.

​--David J. Snyder