Jay Leno Is The Toughest Customer In Comedy After Falling Down A Hill, Busting His Eye, Then Doing A Show

If you had to pick the toughest customer in all of comedy — the He-Man of Ha-Ha, the Bruce Lee of Laughs, the Popeye The Sailor Man after he has eaten spinach of Punchlines — I don’t know who you’d pick, but I bet it wouldn’t be former host of The Tonight Show, Jay Leno.

But as it turns out, the man is essentially the comedy world’s version of the Terminator.

TMZ caught up with Leno at a charity event where he showed up sporting an eyepatch and a bruised face.

The thing about eye-patches is that if someone is wearing one, you really want to know why. It’s not always socially acceptable to ask (although I get a pass because I had to wear one for a lazy eye when I was a kid, so I get a full-time pass), but fortunately, the intrepid TMZ reporter asked and got the scoop.

Well, I was staying at a hotel that’s on a hill,” Leno said. “I said to the guy, ‘Where’s a good place to eat?’ and he goes, ‘Oh at the bottom (of the hill).’”

However, Leno — despite being a man who owns an airplane hangar full of cars — was without a car for what has to be one of like five times in his entire life. So, to get to this restaurant, he said he would’ve had to walk like a mile and a half around, instead of just going down the hill to the restaurant which he could see from the hotel.

So, Leno decided to go with the “Work smarter, not harder” hill option.

“I said, ‘Well, the hill doesn’t look that steep” — it’s about sixty or seventy feet — “let me see if I can go down there…”

Unfortunately, the incline was probably just a touch steeper than the comedian thought, and he ended up falling down it. 

“Hit my head on a rock, knocked me in the eye,” he said before showing off a nice shiner.

Jay Leno cruises around one of the many cars in his collection that he didn’t have at the time that he took a tumble down a hill. (Photo by Hollywood To You/Star Max/GC Images)

Thankfully, he’s okay because that could’ve been very bad. I don’t want to speak for Jay, but I’m confident in saying he wouldn’t want his obituary to include the words “…while climbing down a hill to get dinner…” 

No one wants that.

But Leno is Leno, and so after the fall and before going to the hospital, he went and did the show, then went to the hospital upon his return to Los Angeles.

This comes within just a couple years of getting in a motorcycle crash and suffering third-degree burns while working in his shop.

Man, tough as nails, that Jay Leno.