Jay Leno is showing off his “brand-new face” after suffering burn injuries to his face, arms and hands in a gasoline fire back in November. The Tonight Show alum, 72, made an appearance on Wednesday’s episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show to show off how his face has healed after being hospitalized late last year.
“This is a brand new face,” Leno told host Kelly Clarkson. “It is. It’s unbelievable.” Looking back on the incident, which occurred when the comedian was working on one of his cars, Leno told a slightly fictitious version of what actually went down. “I was working on a car and I got a face full of gasoline and it caught fire,” he explained, before joking, “I had been eating a Flamin’ Hot Dorito and when I bit into it, it set my face on fire.”
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The Jay Leno’s Garage host admitted his third-degree burns were “pretty bad,” and required two skin graft procedures as well as several hyperbaric chamber sessions. Now, however, Leno pointed out that his face looks brand new, joking while pointing at his chin, “You’d think there’d be a zipper here or something but no.” Clarkson agreed of his recovery, “You can’t even tell.”
Leno previously opened up about the accident to the Wall Street Journal, telling the publication in December that “anybody who works with their hands on a regular basis is going to have an accident at some point.” He added, “If you play football, you get a concussion or a broken leg. Anything you do, there’s a risk factor.” The You Bet Your Life host found that he had to embrace the situation with a sense of humor, teasing, “There’s nothing worse than whiny celebrities.”
Just a month later, Leno suffered another accident in January, cracking his kneecaps and breaking multiple ribs and his collarbone after getting knocked off of his motorcycle. “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,” he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal of being “clotheslined.”
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