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Why Jay Leno Says There’s ‘Nothing Greater’ Than a Comedian’s Funeral

Comics have a funny way of looking at death

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During a 2017 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Jay Leno shared a heartwarming story about visiting Rodney Dangerfield on his deathbed and trying to make the ailing comedian laugh one last time. Sad as it was to lose a legend like Dangerfield, Leno admitted to Fallon, “There’s nothing better than comedian funerals.” Although he acknowledged that it was a morbid sentiment, one of the reasons he said he feels that way is because, according to him, “Everybody does the best jokes” in a situation like that. While Leno didn’t have a ton of time to list examples in that interview, he did go into more detail on the subject in his 1996 autobiography, Leading with My Chin.

The first funeral he talked about in the book was that of Freddie Prinze, who died in 1977. Prinze’s manager made it clear that he wanted “names only” in attendance, but Leno and his friends showed up anyway. As Leno explained, being a comic, “Your tendency is always to make a joke. Probably for this reason, we had to sit in the back.” In the middle of Tony Orlando’s eulogy, Leno noticed comedian Gary Mule Deer waving a parking stub and loudly whispering, “Do they validate? Do they validate?” “We all tried to stifle our laughter, like a bunch of bad schoolboys,” Leno wrote.

Another comedian whom Leno touched on in both the Fallon interview and his autobiography was Joe E. Ross of Car 54, Where Are You? fame, though the story had to be cleaned up a bit for TV. Leno gets into a lot more specifics in the book, like the fact that when he first laid eyes on Ross, the elder comic was standing in his apartment window completely naked. Ross soon became Leno’s first Hollywood friend, and as he put it, his new pal “loved all the young comics, loved to tell old stories, and most of all, loved prostitutes.”

Fittingly enough for such a man, “Every veteran hooker in town” showed up for his 1982 funeral and had fond remembrances to share with the other mourners. “The first one got up and said, ‘Joey always paid! Always paid! Other guys—you’d blow ‘em and they’d stiff you. Joey, even if he couldn’t get it up, he always gave you the money!’” Leno recalled. The rabbi immediately regretted asking if anyone wanted to say a few words.

But that wasn’t all. Not to be outdone, Leno said, “The next woman stepped forward and began a story about how she was once performing oral sex on Joe while he was driving. Somehow her head got caught in the steering wheel and wedged against the horn ring. The horn started blaring—beeeeeep beeeeeep beeeeeep—as she struggled to get loose. Then a cop pulled them over and, while her head was still stuck in Joe’s lap, screamed at Joe. Which sort of brought new meaning to a moving violation.”

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