If Jay Leno were still hosting The Tonight Show, he’d probably skip Trump entirely.
The late-night veteran said on the Awards Chatter podcast that he wouldn’t know where to “go” when it comes to talking about the president.
“The trouble is, the fun thing about doing politics is you exaggerate it,” he explained. “That’s the big laugh. With Trump,” he continued, for example, “OK, alright, he’s sleeping with a stripper, Stormy Daniels. Where do I go with that? I mean, where do you take…That’s the reality of it.”
Another reason, the host added, is that “When you don’t like someone, it’s harder to make fun of them.”
Leno began hosting The Tonight Show when George H.W. Bush was in office in 1992, and continued hosting throughout the terms of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama until he left the show permanently in 2009. Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to appear on late-night TV while in office when he visited Leno’s Tonight Show that year.
“With George Bush, I could always go, you know, I don’t think President Bush quite understands,” Leno continued on Tuesday. “And people would smile, and you know, that you’re going to give them a little jab.” Times have changed, he said. “Now it’s just... people are so invested in this. It’s very tricky. People think, ‘Oh, it must be great. Don’t you wish you were doing it now? No, because I’m not a Trump fan. I don’t like him.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to say stuff,” he said. “It’s going to be meaner than it is funny, you know?”
Leno had stronger words for current late-night hosts who deliver Trump-heavy monologues on a nightly basis in July, just before Paramount announced that it was ending The Late Show franchise under Stephen Colbert, who is vocally anti-Trump.
“I love political humor, don’t get me wrong,” Leno said at the time, “But it’s just what happens when people wind up cozying too much to one side or the other. 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.”
Leno made the comments before the news of Colbert’s cancellation, but the close timing of their release brought him scorn from hosts Jon Stewart and John Oliver.
“I’m going to take a hard pass on taking comedic advice from Jay Leno,” said Oliver, who had previously slammed the host for the way he talked about then-24-year-old Monica Lewinsky during the Clinton affair scandal.
Stewart mocked Leno for his frequent injuries and called his take “f---ing ridiculous.”
Leno later told Deadline that he felt baited by his interviewer, who he felt “wanted me to say that Republicans laugh at each other more than Democrats. I’m not sure I agreed… I never mentioned another guy being better or worse or anything.”
Any indication that he was dissing Colbert was a misunderstanding, he added. “Two weeks later, Colbert gets fired. Interview comes out. Soon after, I picked up the paper, and they have a picture of me making an angry face and saying late-night hosts are doing it wrong. I didn’t say that,” he declared at the time. “I didn’t. But John Oliver goes, ‘Hey, Jay Leno, f--- you. F--- you for saying that about Colbert.’ But I never said that, I never said it.”
He concluded, “That’s why I tend not to take any of it too seriously.”
In September, when Jimmy Kimmel was pulled from the air by ABC for angering MAGA, Leno declared he was “on Jimmy Kimmel’s side.”
