Leno Undermines Apology: Made a Mistake "I Guess" and Sorry "If I Offended Anybody"

Well, after apologizing last week for asking Tonight Show guest Ryan Phillippe to give the camera his "gayest look," Jay Leno spoke with KMXB radio in Las Vegas about the controversy on Friday and swiftly undermined any value his apology had with a series of pathetic excuses and justifications.

You know, it's really odd how on our show we have plenty of gay guests and plenty of gay guests who you know — 'how's your relationship going, how's your family going' — Melissa Etheridge, with everybody else. To me I never made fun of gay rights or even gay marriage. Do what you want to do. But to me — fashion, lifestyle, hair, you know that kind of stuff — you're a comic. That's what you do.

...I said 'ok, so you were a single good-looking guy on a soap opera' and I made the mistake, I guess, of saying alright, 'Give me your gayest look now. Give me that soap opera gayest look.'

Well, apparently 'gayest look' offended somebody and, you know. But what happens in these things is it then builds to — I would read the blog, 'I didn't see Jay Leno's anti-gay tirade but I heard he went on and on!' So it's one of these things where it just builds and builds and you go look, I'm a comic. If I offended anybody, I'm sorry, this is my job to make a laugh and we're a live show and maybe you say something that's inappropriate and I apologized, and it's as simple as that....(jokes) well I am in rehab now!"

Aside from undermining his own apology with the tired non-apology "if I offended anybody," he completely misses the overall point about how that kind of humor facilitates intolerance, offering "I never made fun of gay rights or even gay marriage," as if making fun of being gay isn't a bigger problem. See, if the premise weren't that merely being gay is somehow intrinsically funny, the joke would be "give me your best soap opera look," not "give me your gayest look," or even "gayest soap opera look" as Leno is now trying to reframe it. Who does he thinks laughs at a joke like that—people who aren't homophobic? Yeesh.

Then, after casting us as oversensitive hysterics in the classic self-defense maneuver of insensitive and obtuse idiots everywhere, he gets to the best part in which he obliquely accuses us of deliberately misrepresenting what happened on the show to gin up outrage. I mean, I really wonder where, exactly, Jay read at "the blog" that he went on an anti-gay tirade—because not only does it not say that anywhere, or anything close to it, it also includes video of the actual exchange, so no one would have to rely on our subjective interpretation of it.

I believe that's called projection, Shakers.

MyGayestLook continues to accept photos. I just put up a whole additional page of 'em this afternoon.