According to an interview he gave on Friday, Jay Leno, the former “Tonight Show” host well known for his passion for automobiles, underwent surgery on Tuesday to repair numerous broken bones sustained in a motorbike accident in early January.
It seems that his sense of humour had returned: “An 83-year-old motorbike being driven by a 72-year-old man. What could possibly fail? He made a clever comment.
On January 17, Mr Leno claimed he smelled petrol while test-driving a 1940 Indian four-cylinder motorcycle with a sidecar.
Two months before this incident, he burned himself while working on cars in his garage.
He was thrown off the motorcycle when he took a diversion to inspect his motorcycle and ran into a concealed wire.
He sustained two broken ribs, two fractured kneecaps, a scar across his neck, a surgically repaired collarbone, and other injuries in the collision.
“It’s a little painful, but it’s not the end of the world,” he said. “Luckily, I’m only 72. If I had been an older man, this could have been very serious.”
The comedian said that his wounds were not serious and that he would be OK to go back to work this weekend during the interview.
Tickets for his forthcoming performance on Sunday night at California’s Comedy and Magic Club are already sold out. He will also perform in Ohio and Arizona during the coming weeks.
In a tweet posted on Friday, Jay Leno stated, “I was riding my motorbike up in Lake Tahoe when I came around the corner and bam, I crashed into Jeremy Renner’s snowplough.”
Mr Leno revealed his motorbike mishap to a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist on Thursday.
The columnist, John Katsilometes, had called to see how he was doing after sustaining severe burns in a garage fire in Burbank, California, in late 2022 that was started by flammable petrol. Adding his two cents, Mr. Leno said, “That was the first accident.”
He admitted in an interview with the Review-Journal that he had been reluctant to talk about the incident in public due to the publicity his earlier motorbike accident had received only a few months earlier.
Mr. Leno required surgery after sustaining “significant burns” to his face, chest, and hands while working on one of his cars in November. After the fire, Mr. Leno said that he would “just need a week or two” to heal.
On Friday, he cracked a joke about the collisions: “I try to crash within five or six miles of my garage all the time so I can get stuff back,” he said.
The accident occurs at the same time that CNBC decides not to renew “Jay Leno’s Garage,” the comedian and car enthusiast’s programme. Since its 2015 launch, the programme has featured celebrity interviews as well as the comedian’s sizable automobile collection.
The choice, according to Mr. Leno, was made as part of a larger initiative to restructure CNBC’s programming. The network’s representatives were mute when prompted for comment.
“I would like to keep working with NBC. So there’s no ill will or bad blood between them, right?” he asked, adding, “I wish them luck in everything there. While we were there, we enjoyed ourselves.
Mr. Leno, who has been a mainstay of NBC’s television programming for three decades, has said that he is looking for a new home for the programme and that streaming platforms “seems to be the wave of the future.”
Please SHARE this article with Family and Friends!
