He who gets the girls laughs last.

Jon Bon Jovi and, to a lesser extent, the three other chaps in the band that shares his last name — well, maybe to a similar extent in hunky guitarist Richie Sambora's case — must therefore do a lot of private chuckling to themselves.

Dismissed as a pack of over-moussed lightweights even by its peers in the American hair-metal heap of the mid-1980s, Bon Jovi today commands a global audience that has barely diminished since it first struck major commercial paydirt with 1986's 14-million-selling Slippery When Wet.

The band's current tour in support of last year's hit Have a Nice Day is, in fact, on target to be its most successful ever. Bon Jovi's agent, Rob Light, recently told Billboard magazine that, since the jaunt began on Nov. 2, it has "without question" been the group's biggest out-of-the-gate tour to date.

Indeed, the band's appeal has warranted four shows at the Air Canada Centre this weekend and next week. It's the longest stand in any city on the tour.

"Sales, attendance, dollars, merchandise — on every level, it's been great. This is monumentally strong," Light said, adding this outing has finally put Bon Jovi "in the same league as the U2s and the Stones and the Springsteens of the world."

At 43, diminutive belter Jon, meanwhile, remains an object of unrelenting adoration for millions around the world who pine variously for his full and always impeccably coiffed head of hair, his cheekbones and a butt that was apparently genetically engineered (honestly, you'll never read anything written by a woman that doesn't mention his butt, and even we straight men have been compelled over the years to acknowledge the super-human thrall in which it holds the opposite sex).

It's not just the frizzy-topped 30- and 40-somethings who grew up on Slippery When Wet and New Jersey and now throng Bon Jovi shows in giddy packs, either. The band's 2002 comeback hit, "It's My Life," was enough to seduce a new generation of female admirers.

So what gives? How has this New Jersey bar band, started by a recording-studio janitor named Jon Bongiovi in 1983, endured this long when so many peers from Poison to R.E.M. have fallen by the wayside?

"It sounds cheesy, but it's the soundtrack of my life," says ardent Toronto fan Stephanie Machado, who at 18 falls far outside the stereotypical conception of the "Jovi cougar" and will be attending two of the four ACC shows this week. "I would have gone to all four," she says, "but my mother would have kicked me out of the house."

Machado concedes that the Bon Jovi "cute" factor was "definitely a part" of her initial attraction to the band, which came when she heard "It's My Life" on the radio in Portugal seven years ago while vacationing with her family. "But it was also really catchy, and back then I was only into really catchy stuff. Later on, though, I looked into the lyrics and — well, it's hard to explain. He's so wonderful. It's really hard to capture how I feel.

"I can relate to pretty much every song, even though Jon's 43. I just find the lyrics very meaningful. Some of them are corny, but it's fun."

"Catchy" and "fun" are two words evoked often by die-hard Bon Jovi fans, most of whom will happily acknowledge that the band's music, for all its metallic trappings, is at heart just a louder breed of bubblegum pop.

And while the critical cognoscenti tends to sneer, the band's insistence upon staying the course all these years and never straying far from the gigantic hooks, the satisfyingly predictable fist-in-the-air choruses and overwrought power balladry that made its name is usually cited as a major reason for the audience's loyalty.

"They're always upbeat," says Alana Cernjul, 29, a Catholic schoolteacher in Mississauga who's been known to perform Bon Jovi karaoke in class and to share the records (along with those of Tupac Shakur and Kanye West) with her students for their positive messages.

"I was known as this sort of obsessive, Bon Jovi-fan teacher and a lot of the kids had never heard of the band because it wasn't their generation, so I brought some of the music in when we were doing these music journals in my classes. The kids really started to catch on to the songs.

"On every album, there are two or three songs that portray this seize-the-day, live-life-to-the-fullest message — songs like `Livin' on a Prayer' or `Keep the Faith.' I think they can sort of pull that positivity from the songs."

There's been limited experimentation within the form — the adult-contemporary and country leanings of Have a Nice Day, for instance — but Bon Jovi and songwriting partner Sambora are to be commended for resisting the urge through fleeting trends and fashions to make a nu-metal record or incorporate newfangled samples and drum loops into their tried-and-true formulas. At the height of grunge, they dropped the typically meat-and-potatoes Keep the Faith and sold 12 million copies, slightly more than Nirvana's Nevermind.

The only time the band's fans have seriously recoiled was when it revisited a bunch of its old hits in acoustic form for 2003's This Left Feels Right. Jon would later politely apologize. ("People were saying, `Don't mess with our memories,'" he told a U.K. newspaper last year.)

"They're true. They've always stayed real," says Karen Bowen, a 30-something technical consultant from Colorado and regular presence in Bon Jovi chat rooms. "There's always stuff you can relate to. They're Jersey boys."

Bon Jovi's down-to-earth approach tends to appeal to down-to-earth, working-class people, says Bowen, which is why she's found it extremely easy to make friends from Toronto to Philadelphia to Idaho Falls online and at shows over the years.

Bowen was even inspired by the altruism Bon Jovi has shown in his frequent donations to causes ranging from New Jersey orphanages to Habitat for Humanity — which he raised $450,000 for last year and incorporated into the video for "Who Says you Can't Go Home" — to raise money with a friend to send 200 copies of the band's 2002 album, Bounce, in care packages to American troops in the Middle East.

"After Sept. 11, he and Dorothea (Hurley, Jon's childhood sweetheart and wife of 26 years) went out and made sandwiches and took them to help the people working there," she says. "Last year, he went on Oprah and donated a million dollars to Katrina victims. They've been doing that stuff for 20 years. "

The ability to maintain a credible blue-collar connection with its audience while maintaining several luxury residences only goes so far in explaining the Bon Jovi mystique, however.

At the heart of it all, even the most cynical music critic must admit that Bon Jovi writes killer pop songs. While they definitely flirt with the formulaic — "It's My Life" and "Livin' on a Prayer" are essentially the same song — they are indisputably insidious; once heard, they will replay forever in your head.

"Wanted (Dead or Alive)." "Bad Medicine." "I'll Be There for You." "Blaze of Glory." Read those titles and try to fight the hooks storming into your brain.

"They've got great choruses — great singalong choruses," says Tom Marchese, 25, of Brampton. " `Livin' on a Prayer' is the greatest example: it's always that kinda mellow `Tommy used to work on the dock ...' thing and then it explodes into that great, bellowing chorus.

"It's not sophisticated rock like a band like Yes used to be ... . It's just feel-good music. And they're the kings of monster power ballads."

Marchese, a sous-chef in a hotel, will be attending all four of Bon Jovi's ACC shows and made the drive to Buffalo on Friday night to catch another.

He's already seen the band (including the seldom-mentioned David Bryan and Tico Torres) 24 times in Canada and "all over the States." Through the fan club, he's also furnished Jon's mother with diabetic recipes, for which he received a thank-you note and a DVD signed by the entire band.

Being male, Marchese is something of an anomaly among the stormy sea of female hormones that a Bon Jovi concert can become. But while he takes "a bit" of ribbing from his friends for his fandom ("they think I take it one step too far"), he can defend it with a certain degree of musical authority since he moonlights as a musician in a cover band called Stillwind.

"It's not a boring obsession or stalking or anything," he laughs. "I love the band. I mean, I'm a musician and I go to every possible rock show that comes to Toronto and they border upon some of the best shows I've ever seen. They're up there with McCartney, Springsteen, all of them. I've never met anybody who walked out of a Bon Jovi show who didn't think they got their money's worth."

Especially the ladies. There's still something about that lad that reduces sane, mature women to doting jelly. Jon gamely plays along, parlaying the whoops that greet his power ballads and his close-ups on the monitor in concert into a femme-friendly film and TV career including spots on Sex and the City and Ally McBeal and the film Moonlight and Valentino.

"I was 10 when I first heard Slippery When Wet and just at that age where I was starting to have crushes," says Cernjul. "And Jon Bon Jovi was just so cute. Plus, in their videos, they were always depicted as this kind of raw, `cowboy' band. When you're a teenage girl, that's very sexy. That's what you wanted every guy to be."

Just don't make assumptions about the women he's wooing in the audience, says Bowen.

"There's that typical girl who's only there to see Jon shake his butt. Those are the ones who are embarrassing and you try to stay away from," she laughs. "But I'm not some ditzy blonde. I have two masters degrees."

I saw Bon Jovi a couple of years ago on the Bounce tour, and they were incredible live!

I saw John Bon Jovi at a John Kerry rally. He did a small acoustic set, sitting on a stool on the sidewalk in downtown Warren, OH. I'm not much of a Bon Jovi fanatic, but he sounded great live. That's always impressive when musicians can do stuff like that, hold their own without the need for a herd of backup dancers, big name producers, pyrotechnics, and other gimmicks...