Not even four months ago, Jay Leno was in intensive care getting skin grafts for third-degree burns he suffered during a terrible accident.
Now, he’s back to work and making an appearance on “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” showing off his “new face.”
In a clip from Wednesday’s episode, Leno walks out to a rousing round of applause and a standing ovation.
After lamenting that he missed a previously scheduled appearance on the show because of the accident, Clarkson told him, “You look great though!”
“This is a brand-new face,” he told her.
JAY LENO HAS ‘SERIOUS BURNS’ FROM A ‘GASOLINE FIRE,’ NEEDS ‘WEEK OR TWO’ FOR RECOVERY
Jay Leno recounted the moments after his face caught on fire during a gasoline accident at his garage. (Rodin Eckenroth)
The comment got a reaction from the audience, and Leno looked out and insisted, “It is, it’s unbelievable.”
“What happened, I was working on a car and I got a face full of gasoline and it caught fire. And I had been eating a flaming hot Dorito and when I bit into it, it set my face on …,” he quipped.
Clarkson and the audience cut him off with laughter, but he continued on a slightly more serious note.
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“It was interesting,” he said. “It was all third-degree burns, it was pretty bad. It was pretty bad.”
Leno joked this is the second time in his career he is “the new face of comedy.” (Donald Kravitz)
“You can’t tell at all,” the talk show host told him, clearly in awe of his appearance after that kind of trauma.
“No, you think there’d be a zipper here or something,” he joked, pulling at an imaginary zipper across the bottom of his face. “No, this is like a brand-new face.”
Leno went for another laugh, saying, “Only for the second time in my career am I the new face of comedy.”
The comedian said that he had a “brand-new ear,” as well.
On Nov. 12, 2022, Leno was working on a steam car at his garage with a friend. Steam cars, he explained in a previous interview, have gasoline, but they also have a pilot light to assist in creating the steam.
There was a clog somewhere that he was working on, and as he pushed some air in the line to get it loose, gasoline squirted all over his face, and since he was also close to the pilot light, disaster struck.
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“It felt exactly like my face was on fire,” he recalled to People magazine. “Maybe like the most intense sunburn you’ve ever had, that’d be fair to say.”
Leno reveals the burns he suffered from a garage fire as he leaves the Grossman Burn Center in West Hills, California. (Grossman Burn Center)
Leno was able to keep his wits about him enough to keep his eyes shut and to hold his breath until the fire was out, and paramedics quickly arrived to treat him.
He suffered deep burns across much of his upper body, and underwent two skin grafts.
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Leno’s surgeon has called the comic “an outlier in terms of how well he’s healed considering the severity of his injuries.”
