Jay Leno weighed in on cancel culture and said it’s a matter of changing “with the times” or a person’s career dies.
“When I do a gig in Utah and they’ll go, ‘Look, we don’t want any drug jokes, we don’t want any sex jokes,'” the 71-year-old former host of “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” told the Los Angeles Times in a piece published Wednesday. (RELATED: Jay Leno: Politics Was Funnier When ‘Clinton Was Horny’ And ‘Bush Was Dumb’)
“I go, ‘OK, I’ll take those out’ and I do something else,” he added. “With the #MeToo movement, all of a sudden the sexist jokes everybody used to do, you can’t do anymore. So you either change with the times or you die. You adapt to the circumstances.” (RELATED: Jay Leno Survives Terrifying Rollover Crash [VIDEO])
Seven years after leaving @nbc’s “The Tonight Show,” @jayleno is making a big return back to daily TV.https://t.co/5MT6wWNbkI
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) September 1, 2021
Leno made headlines earlier this year when he issued an apology for past jokes about Asians and said he knew in his heart it was “wrong.”
The talk show host made jokes about Koreans eating cats or dogs close to nine different times between 2002 and 2012, the Wrap noted.
“At the time I did those jokes, I genuinely thought them to be harmless,” Jay explained. “I was making fun of our enemy North Korea, and like most jokes, there was a ring of truth to them.”
Leno becomes the latest comedian to reflect on the current cancel culture, with people like Chris Rock ripping it and saying people “are scared” to speak.
While others like Seth Rogen have defended it and shared comedians should stop complaining about it and “accept it” if their jokes “have not aged well.”
The stand-up comedian also talked about his return to daily TV as the host of a reboot classic game show on Sept. 13 “You Bet Your Life” and he said there will be no politics discussed.
“We’ll pair a rapper from Chicago with an Ohio farmer lady, and they work as a team and it’s quite funny to watch,” Leno shared about his new project. “There’s no politics, there’s no [former President Donald] Trump jokes, there’s no [President Joe] Biden jokes. There are jokes about Congress in that generic sort of ‘they’re idiots’ type of thing.”