Jay Leno is still recovering from his recent accidents, and it has not been fun. First, he suffered burns on his face while working on a car in his Los Angeles garage in November. Then in January, he was involved in a motorcycle accident that left him with multiple broken bones. In a new podcast interview with Dana Carvey and David Spade, Leno said he now has a new face and “brand-new ear.”
“This [is] an all-new face,” Leno, 72, told Carvey and Spade on the March 29 episode of their Fly on the Wall podcast, via E! News. “I did it in eight days. I missed two shows.” The January accident left him with a “broken collarbone,” “two busted ribs,” and “two cracked kneecaps… ’cause I got clothesline on my motorcycle,” Leno told his fellow comedians.
Videos by PopCulture.com
“You’re a 72-year-old guy and an 83-year-old motorcycle. What could go wrong?” Leno continued. “I said, ‘Uh oh. It’s dripping gas. I don’t want to catch fire. Lemme turn around.’ I turn around in a parking lot and the guy had a wire across a parking lot but with no flag. And the sun was right here. And boom it just hit me.”
After the accident, Leno also had to call in the doctor who helped him after the fire mishap. “I go, ‘Listen, you know that face, you gave me that new face? I gotta get it fixed,’” Leno recalled. “[He goes], ‘What’d you do?’ I told him, I drove up there and he fixed it again.”
The fire accident left Leno changed forever. In that case, gasoline caught on fire while he was working on one of his beloved classic cars. His friend, Dave Killackey, helped smother the fire and called 911. The former Tonight Show host was then treated at the Grossman Burne Center in Los Angeles. He suffered burns to his face, chest, and hands.
“This is a brand-new ear,” Leno said this week. “When you get burned in a fire, ears are like paper. They’re so thin it just goes up.”
Leno showed off his “incredible” brand-new face during a stop on The Kelly Clarkson Show earlier this month and continued marveling at the work his doctors did. “I was working on a car and I got a face full of gasoline and it caught fire,” Leno told Kelly Clarkson. “I had been eating a Flamin’ Hot Dorito and when I bit into it, it set my face on fire.” The comedian later turned serious though, explaining that the third-degree burns were “pretty bad.” He said he needed two skin graft procedures and spent time in hyperbaric chambers.
As for the motorcycle accident, Leno came clean about that during an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The crash happened while he was testing a 1940 Indian motorcycle. He smelled the scent of leaking gas, so he tried to turn into a parking lot to check it out.
“So I turned down a side street and cut through a parking lot, and unbeknownst to me, some guy had a wire strung across the parking lot but with no flag hanging from it,” Leno explained. “So, you know, I didn’t see it until it was too late. It just clothesline me and, boom, knocked me off the bike. The bike kept going, and you know how that works out.”
