I used to feel cheated when I would turn on “The Tonight Show” and, instead of seeing Johnny, there’d be Jay Leno with his lantern jaw and nasally voice, telling jokes that I resentfully listened to. Something about him was endearing and magnetic, though, and that something invariably kept me from switching over to the other late-night option, “Nightline.” Most of Leno’s appeal, of course, was that he was pricelessly funny, but part of it was that he reminded me of my older brother, the family clown who always had new jokes to tell whenever the lot of us siblings gathered together.

Saturday night, after watching Leno’s two full-house performances at the Maine Center for the Arts, I realized that, yes, Leno is inordinately funny, but that the key to his humor, and to his success, is that he reminds everybody of their older brother. He taps into the greatest common denominators that join most of middle class America: family, government, relationships, “Star Trek” and McDonald’s. Then he makes us laugh at how ludicrously kooky these lives of ours are.

“Topical humor” is what Leno’s shtick is called. He said he likes to give people their money’s worth, so each show lasted nearly two hours. That’s an impressive amount of time for one man to keep coming up with topics that make 1,640 people hoot and cry and cheer enthusiastically.

Leno poked fun at Earthquake Awareness Week, female food bonding, “thirtysomething,” cinema houses (which he called cement bunkers that look like communist debriefing centers), and fast-food. “I’m an American,” he said. “If it doesn’t come in a styrofoam box with a lid on it, I don’t eat it.”

Describing the McDonald’s “Fiesta Give Away” promotion, where patrons receive a south-of-the-border coin when they purchase food, Leno said that America is the only nation that can “go to a country, crush its economy, and then use their legal tender as a toy.”

Sarcastically lauding the films “Rambo III” and “Predator,” Leno said that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger “opened up the movie industry for people who couldn’t get into film when speech was a major requirement.”

Roaring laughter filled the concert hall when Leno defined the biggest difference between men and women: “All men laugh at the Three Stooges and all women think they’re stupid.”

During both performances, Leno interacted with audience members and showed his breakneck wit, something we simply don’t get to see enough of when Leno is guest host of “The Tonight Show.”

It’s a tremendous gift when a person can pick on you, laugh in your face, mock your lifestyle, tease you because of your job or your clothes or your looks, and leave you feeling exhilarated and a bit more confident about being in this all too often nutty world. My brother, of course, never got away with it, but Jay Leno did.