No, Barack Obama Did Not Get Jay Leno Fired From The Tonight Show
He may be chuckling on the outside, but he’s filled with rage on the inside.
As readers of this website are well aware, I belong to a number of Facebook groups mocking Conservative memes and other expressions of Trump-fueled right-wing insanity.
That’s because I am morbidly fascinated by the poignant, pathetic delusions of Trump super-fans and because I get a whole lot of juicy blog posts out of chronicling the crazed fantasies of people who LITERALLY think that Donald Trump was sent by Jesus Christ HIMSELF to save our country from godless, Communist heathens.
In one of these groups I came across a fascinating exercise in projection that reads, “WHY NBC GOT RID OF JAY LENO
News is leaking out from Hollywood executives in-the-know that the Obama White House had been leaning on, pressuring executives at NBC for the last two years to replace Jay Leno because the comedian was criticizing Obama every night. Obama didn't like it and considered it a racist attack on him.
After data came to light that $100's of millions had been spent on First Family vacations during a recession, Mrs. Obama's unpopular new laws that changed food in America's schools and other negative news including the disastrous Obamacare roll-out & website mess, Jay Leno took his comedy to a new level and his ratings skyrocketed -- none of the other comics were so bold.
NBC couldn't stomach the fact that Leno's jokes about Obama were always right on target about the first black president. And left-leaning Democrat executives at NBC were being harassed by Obama himself who thought the comedy was a racist attack on him.”
This introduction was followed by a series of canned one-liners Leno did about Obama and his administration. It’s late period Jay Leno material so it is of course a woeful combination of lazy and safe, toothless and predictable.
It’s literally impossible to imagine Obama even watching Jay Leno night after night. Unlike Donald Trump, Obama didn’t seem to watch a whole lot of television because his time and energy were consumed by BEING PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, A HUSBAND AND A FATHER TO TWO DAUGHTERS.
In order to buy into the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama personally ended Leno’s incarnation of The Tonight Show out of thin-skinned rage and a brittle unwillingness to endure even the mildest of jabs, japes and jokes you have to forget everything you know about Obama and Leno.
You gotta admitted Obama really committed to the whole “I don’t hate Jay Leno and am obsessed with getting him fired” bit
You have to believe that Obama, a famously cool and unflappable figure, was somehow able to endure eight years of vitriolic racism, death threats, vicious attacks on his wife and family and the unrelenting pressure that comes with having the biggest, most important and scrutinized job in the world but could not handle banal quips from late-night funnymen and became obsessed with destroying Jay Leno professionally.
You similarly have to see Leno, a famously safe, toothless figure of the establishment whose primary goal as a talk show host seemed to be to avoid offending anyone as a Lenny Bruce-like threat to corrupt authority who had to be silenced before he single-handedly destroyed our first black president.
Last but not least, in order to subscribe to the preposterous notion that Barack Obama personally had Jay Leno taken off the air because he couldn’t handle a comedian making jokes about him you have to overlook the inconvenient fact that, despite ostensibly being a sworn enemy of Jay Leno and The Tonight Show, Obama nevertheless APPEARED ON THE TONIGHT SHOW NO LESS THAN SIX TIMES.
Barack Obama did not, in fact, convince NBC to get rid of Jay Leno. That wasn’t Obama’s thing. Attempting to get comedians fired or thrown in prison for having the audacity to mock the most mockable man in the world was Donald Trump’s shtick and thankfully that’s one of the many, many, many areas in his presidency and life where he very aggressively did not succeed, thank God.
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