Jay Leno makes a reported $32 million a year as the host of NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," and banks every dime. Just in case.

"I've always done that," Leno said over the phone the other day. "That's my style."

It started when he was growing up in Massachusetts and had two jobs: One at McDonald's, the other at a car dealership.

He saved the fast-food money and lived on the dealership money. Then he banked the dealership money and lived on the money he made doing stand-up. Then he lived on the stand-up money and banked the "Tonight Show" checks.

So now you know: The money Leno will make at the Snoqualmie Casino ballroom tonight will likely pay for groceries and gas for one of his many vintage cars.

But ... why?

"I've always looked at TV as a temporary job," he said, "and then it ends and you don't work for a long time."

Comedians are an insecure lot, aren't they? Leno has been on the air since 1992, and still he worries about holding onto his job.

Few know that better than Conan O'Brien and David Letterman, who both competed against Leno for NBC's 11:30 p.m. slot — and lost.

Ironically, and hours after our interview, Leno landed in the comedic cross hairs of his two former rivals, when O'Brien was a guest on Letterman's May 18 show.

At first, O'Brien acted like he wasn't going to say much about the events of 2010, when Leno took back the "Tonight Show" spot that O'Brien had barely broken in. (He only had the chair for seven months.)

"I was told none of this would come up tonight," O'Brien told a goading Letterman. "I was told we would talk of our shared love of antiquing."

There would be no such delicacy. Letterman asked O'Brien about his relationship with Leno "before the felony took place," and all bets were off.

O'Brien did a spot-on, tight-voiced Leno impression. He said the two of them didn't have that much in common, and that he didn't own "many automobiles that were made before 1904," alluding to Leno's massive car collection.

Letterman called Leno "a bit of a brat," and said that when Leno took back the 11:30 p.m. spot that O'Brien had inherited (and that Letterman had coveted when Johnny Carson retired in 1992) "I said to myself, 'This is the Jay I know.' "

There was no going back for Leno's reaction. His publicist had made that clear, saying that our talks "cannot concern late-night television."

So we stuck to the stand-up — starting with the fact that Leno has been making Sunday-night appearances at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach since 1978, as a way to work on his act.

"You can't just run marathons," he said. "You have to run every day. If you're trying to keep a couple of hours of material in your head all the time, you have to work on it."

Sometimes a joke seems funny, but you don't really know until it hits the room.

"Comedy is very audience dependent, so you go out and work," Leno said. "Plus, it's fun. I like being a comic."

The benefit of a live show is that he can "get the whole room."

If you see someone not laughing, you can try to loosen them up.

Television? Not so much.

"TV is so subjective," Leno said. "You just do the best you can. You'll never get the whole room. You don't really know if something is funny."

He gets a lot of help from his writers — some of whom live in the Northwest and send him jokes. If they're good enough, he hires them onto his staff, sight unseen.

One joke-writer he hired turned out to be an Orthodox rabbi. Another had severe cerebral palsy; he showed up at NBC and told Leno he had to work at home. Fine with Leno. "I was hiring people based on the material," he said.

No conversation with Leno is complete without talking about cars.

That morning, he drove his 1966 Ford 7-liter Galaxie in to work. He finished the restoration last year.

"It was the car I made my dad buy when I was a kid," Leno said.

He remembered every detail: the dealership (Shawsheen Motors in Andover, Mass.), the salesman's name (Tom Lawrence), and that, unbeknownst to his father, Leno ordered the 428 engine with the "police pursuit package," the muffler-delete option and bucket seats.

When the car arrived, Leno's father was incensed, calling it "a (expletive) rocket ship."

Three months later, Leno found a speeding ticket in his father's drawer: He had been caught going 110 mph in the car he didn't want.

Years later, Leno would put the car into a tree. And years after that, he would find another just like it, and restore it.

God knows he had the money.

Nicole & Co. is a new weekly column featuring interviews with local and visiting personalities.

Nicole Brodeur: 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com