Jay Leno’s Road Rage Made a Grown Man Cry
Jay Leno has been in the news a lot lately, not because of his stand-up comedy career, but because he fell down a hill while trying to grab dinner in a Pennsylvania suburb and ended up looking like a cartoon pirate who owes 50 grand to the mob as a result.
Leno nearly dying next to a Hampton Inn has perhaps distracted from what otherwise would have surely been his biggest embarrassment of the month: a network Christmas special even worse than the one hosted by Jimmy Fallon.
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For the past several years, TMZ has aired an annual special dubbed TMZ’s Merry Elfin’ Christmas. Instead of just inserting digital Santa hats on a montage of famous corpses, TMZ throws a party and invites celebrity guests. Past specials have included folks like Bill Maher, Mark Cuban, and Tiffany Haddish. And where else on TV will you find Kenny G serenading Harvey Levin and his staff of insipid trash people?
This year, Leno popped by the show, which clearly wasn’t shot very close to Christmas, because the former Tonight Show host doesn’t look like he just went 12 rounds with Ivan Drago.
Ads for the show hyped the fact that Leno would be telling a story involving both “Taylor Swift” and “road rage.” But it turns out that it was Leno’s road rage, and Swift really had nothing to do with it, thus calling into question the journalistic integrity of TMZ for the very first time.
Leno told a story that illustrated how he’s both a nice folksy guy and a complete and utter psycho. According to Leno, back in his Tonight Show days, he was driving one of his many janky old vintage cars around Los Angeles. A frustrated motorist eventually overtook Leno’s slower car, and flipped him off as he passed.
Instead of letting it go, Leno followed the driver and struck up a conversation. “I pulled up to the light, and I looked at the guy, and I go, ‘What was that all about?’” Leno explained. “He starts swearing, and that’s when I laid into him. I said, ‘Let me guess. What are you 52? Divorced? Your kids hate you, you’re bald? What was your greatest day, in high school?’”
Yeah, that’s right, if you give Jay Leno the finger, he will respond by crushing your soul into tiny pieces. How did this random stranger react to being told that his life is completely worthless by a late-night talk show host? Well, he started crying, and told Leno, “You’re right man.”
After realizing that he just destroyed this guy’s life for no good reason, Leno came up with a solution: “I said, ‘Look, I got Taylor Swift on the show next Wednesday. Do your daughters like Taylor Swift?’ (He said), ‘Oh, they love Taylor Swift.’”
Not only did Leno invite this guy and his family to the show, he was able to bring them backstage to meet Taylor Swift. Leno remarked that Swift was the “nicest person” during the encounter — presumably because she didn’t once question why she was being asked to repair some broken family just to make Jay Leno feel less bad for being a giant asshole.
