Monica Lewinsky Reminds Jay Leno That He Didn’t Always Steer Clear of Politics

Jay Leno should have known what he was getting into when he told the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation that today’s comedy has become “just really political.” Comedians who clearly state their positions are alienating half their audiences, he complained. “Why not try to get the whole? I like to bring people into the big picture. I don’t understand why you would alienate one particular group — or just don’t do it at all... Just do what’s funny.”

The blowback was immediate. John Oliver heard the interview and decided, “I’m going to take a hard pass on taking comedic advice from Jay Leno.” And his old Daily Show partner, Jon Stewart, had no patience for Leno’s idea of avoiding “jokes about things you actually think.” 

“The whole thing,” Stewart said, “is fucking ridiculous.”

Others, including Cracked, wasted no time reminding Leno that he’d made plenty of alienating, partisan jokes during his tenure as Tonight Show host. Literally hundreds of those jokes (454 to be exact) took aim at Monica Lewinsky. 

In a July 27th reply to a since deleted tweet, Lewinsky refused to let Leno off the hook for his one-sided political jokes at a young woman’s expense. “totally see where you’re coming from,” Lewinsky wrote to the original poster, “but i think what he’s pointing out is that leno made many, many cruel jokes about me (so much so that i was in the top 10 list of his targets… from all the years he was on the air)…”

Yep, Lewinsky finished #8 on the list of Leno’s most popular joke subjects, according to a George Mason University analysis. Number one was Bill Clinton, the target of 4,468 punchlines. For those keeping score, that number is nearly 50 percent more than the 2,999 jokes Leno told about his #2 subject, George W. Bush. For a guy who didn’t want to alienate one particular group, Leno had a weird way of showing it. 

Lewinsky pointed out another salient fact when she guested on the Call Her Daddy podcast earlier this year. Among the people on Leno’s joke list, which also included luminaries like Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson, “I was the only person who wasn't a public figure.”

After the Call Her Daddy podcast, Leno — via “sources close to Jay” — let TMZ know that he thinks Lewinsky should just get over it. “He didn’t target Monica personally back then — he says she was just an easy punchline and fair game,” Leno’s pals told TMZ. It’s a predictably tone-deaf response, claiming he didn’t target Lewinsky while admitting she was an easy punchline.

Even if you believe Lewinsky’s presence in the news demanded jokes, those kinds of gags still fly in the face of Leno’s “don’t take sides” lecture. Lewinsky continues to make her position clear by the voices she’s amplifying on Twitter/X, retweeting one user who wrote: “Wow look at that @MonicaLewinsky, turns out jay leno isn’t a fan of politician jokes. Who would have known?”