Speaking during a Saturday, July 26, conversation with Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation President David Trulio, former “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno went nuclear on other late-night comedians and their producers, blasting the current crop of late-night comedy shows for dividing and alienating America with one-sided, partisan jokes.
Leno’s comments to Trulio on the matter came in the context of is explaining why he did comedy the way he did, explaining that he tried to keep things at least somewhat politically biased over his 22-year comedy run so that he would entertain America rather than alienating it with a plethora of one-sided jokes.
Particularly, he noted that while political humor can be funny, alienating one’s audience with jokes that just side with and cozy up to one side seems like a bad idea, saying, “I love political humor, don’t get me wrong. But it’s just what happens when people wind up cozying too much to one side or the other.”
Emphasizing that point, he commented on the fact that alienating one side of the roughly equal political aisles means cutting your audience in half, which is a very bad idea. He said, “Why shoot for just half an audience all the time? You know, why not try to get the whole. I mean, I like to bring people into the big picture.”
Further, he noted that he had intentionally done quite the opposite, focusing instead on being fair to both sides, something that his audience members seems to recognize and appreciate about his routine. He said, “I’d get letters saying, ‘You and your Republican friends,’ and others saying, ‘You and your Democratic buddies,’ over the same joke. And I’d think, that’s perfect. That’s how you get a whole audience.”
That wasn’t all. Leno also invoked his late friend and famous comedian Rodney Dangerfield to comment on what comedians should do, noting that the point of comedy is to be funny and entertaining rather than be a woke moralizer. He said, on that point, “Funny is funny… We just discussed jokes.”
Additionally, Leno emphasized much that same point about just being funny when he noted that comedians should be funny and entertaining rather than alienating groups for political reasons. He said, “I like to bring people into the big picture. I don’t understand why you would alienate one particular group. Just do what’s funny.”
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Leno’s comments came in the wake of CBS personality Stephen Colbert seeing his “The Late Show” permanently canceled for “financial reasons,” with the show and comedian that became a byword for outright and unapologetic wokeness reportedly losing tens of millions of dollars every year, with the former audience tuning out of the unfunny show.
Instead of just admitting that Colbert wasn’t funny and his show was canceled for that reason, his fellow TV hosts went berserk over the news. For example, “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin said, “The First Amendment is the First Amendment for a reason and that is freedom of the press, freedom of speech. Freedom to speak truth to power.” She continued, “If that is taken away, if the comedians are being attacked, then that means our Constitution is being dismantled…”