Compiled by the regular "Tonight Show" guest host, this collection lampoons strange headlines, photos, and ads that somehow manage to find their way into America's newspapers

One of America's top comedians has turned his attention to serious matters--only he's not taking them very seriously! Jay Leno has compiled the hilarious headlines and articles sent in by his fans to come up with page after page of outrageously funny material on the subject of police foul-ups and bungling criminals.

Bill Carter, executive producer of CNN’s docuseries The Story of Late Night and host of the Behind the Desk: Story of Late Night podcast, details the chaotic transition of The Tonight Show from host Jay Leno to Conan O’Brien—and back again. In 2010, NBC’s CEO Jeff Zucker, had it all worked out when he moved Jay Leno from behind the desk at The Tonight Show, and handed the reins over to Conan O'Brien. But his decision was a spectacular failure. Ratings plummeted, affiliates were enraged—and when Zucker tried to put everything back the way it was, that plan backfired as well. No one is more uniquely suited to document the story of a late-night travesty than veteran media reporter and bestselling author, Bill Carter. In candid detail, he charts the vortex that sucked in not just Leno and O'Brien—but also Letterman, Stewart, Fallon, Kimmel, and Ferguson—as frantic agents and network executives tried to manage a tectonic shift in television’s most beloved institution.

Little Jay's mom is thrifty, his dad is extravagant, and Jay always seems to be caught in the middle.

Long before he became the host of the tonight show, Jay Leno was dubbed by the media and his peers alike as the "Hardest-working Man in Show Business." Performing comedy at a breakneck pace, he played more than 300 dates a year and traveled to every corner of the nation. Or as his mother who never quite understood what he did for a living, liked to say, "Going from town to town, putting on his little skits."--

Full of revealing portraits of many of the best-known comedic talents of the 1970s, "I'm Dying Up Here" is also a poignant tale of the price of success and the terrible cost of failure--professional and moral.