(LifeSiteNews) – Comedy icon Jay Leno offered a window into the perverse values of Hollywood recently when he revealed that he was recently asked if he planned to acquire a girlfriend during his wife’s bout with dementia.
The 75-year-old Leno, who succeeded TV legend Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show in 1992 and retired in 2014, has been married to his wife Mavis, 79, since 1980. In January 2024, Mavis was revealed to have been diagnosed with dementia, which is now said to be “advanced.”
Leno, who has been caring for her ever since, recently sat down for an interview with Maria Shriver, and relayed a shocking question he received about the situation from an unidentified denizen of America’s entertainment capital.
“My favorite thing was — this is the most Hollywood thing. A guy said to me, ‘So, are you gonna get a girlfriend now?’” Leno said. He answered, “Well, no, I have a girlfriend. I’m married. Married 45 years,” to which the questioner said simply, “yeah, but you know what I mean.”
“No, we’re kinda in this together here,” Leno said, mocking the idea of saying “‘Honey, I’ll be with my girlfriend. I’ll be back later.’”
“You take a vow when you get married and people are stunned, they’re so shocked that you live up to it. Why?” Leno observed. Once “just doing the right thing because you’re supposed to (…) used to be the norm,” he added, “and then when you strayed that was the out of whack part. Now the out of whack part is fairly common, and staying and doing what you’re supposed to do is stunning to people.”
The comedian admitted that Mavis’ condition has been trying, such as his wife continually forgetting and rediscovering her mother’s passing, but he kept it in perspective of the remarkable good fortune of having a happy, healthy marriage for so long up to this point. “This is that thing of, ‘OK, you’ve been pretty lucky up to this point. It’s been easy sailing. This is where it gets a little tricky,’” he said.
“The other night we’re lying in bed, and Mavis says — it’s like 2 o’clock — she goes, ‘Honey, I love you,’” he shared. “I said, ‘You’re having a nightmare, go back to bed.’ She thought that was the funniest thing, she just couldn’t stop laughing. And to me that’s what’s fun. ‘Oh, I got a laugh out of her.’”
While not a conservative, Leno is seen by many as one of the last heirs of Carson’s style of late-night television comedy, which brought audiences together for decades in part by lightheartedly poking fun at all figures and factions of American politics – a bold contrast to the bitter left-wing partisanship that has come to define current hosts like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert.
Leno himself commented on the shift last summer, explaining, “I like to think that people come to a comedy show to kind of get away from the things, you know, the pressures of life, whatever it might be. And I love political humor, don’t get me wrong, but it’s just what happens when people wind up cozying too much to one side or the other (…) I don’t think anybody wants to hear a lecture.”
