• “As you know, we’re not just a show anymore, we are now now a collector’s item.”
• “As you may know, our show has been canceled. Fired again! See, that shows you NBC’s got nothing. Even when they fire people, it’s a rerun—didn’t we just get fired in May?”
• “NBC said the show performed exactly as they expected it would, and then they canceled us. Don’t confuse it with when we’re on at late night, and we performed better than expected, and they canceled us. That was totally different!”
• “Supposedly we’re moving to 11:30, but even this is not sure. See, my people are upset, Conan’s people are upset. Hey, NBC said they wanted drama at 10—now they got it!”
• I take pride in one thing. I leave NBC primetime the same way I found it: a complete disaster.”

Is this guys the world’s biggest asshole? Leno didn’t get fired from the Tonight Show, he set his own exit date in 2009. Here is an excerpt from a 2004 article in case anyone needs reminding:

On Monday, Jay Leno announced that he had selected O’Brien to take over his Tonight Show gig when he steps down in 2009, thereby avoiding the competitive drama and negativity that accompanied his own ascendance to the Tonight Show throne.

“In 2009, I’ll be 59 years old and will have had this dream job for 17 years,” Leno said in a statement Monday. ”When I signed my new contract, I felt that the timing was right to plan for my successor and there is no one more qualified than Conan. Plus, I promised [my wife] Mavis I would take her out for dinner before I turned 60.”

And the best part:

On the anniversary show, Leno recalled that “a lot of good friendships were permanently damaged” when he was selected to succeed Carson over rival David Letterman, spawning a feud that lives on between the two late night yakkers.

“Quite frankly, I don’t want to see anybody go through that again,” Leno said.

This guy will apparently do anything to stay on TV, even if it means dicking everyone over in the process. How this unfunny, irrelevant, back-stabbing-with-a-smile, bitter-about-the-job-he-turned-down douche still has a voice in his industry, especially after a very failed attempt at a new prime time program — it’s beyond me.

EDIT: Also, from WWTDD:

Leno is a little underhanded bitch. ‘The Late Shift’ talks about him hiding in closets to spy on meetings. ‘Headlines’ is the exact same thing as ‘Small Town News’, which Letterman has been doing since the 80‘s. In his autobiography, he tells a story about appearing on the Dinah Shore show (read the entire story here, word for word from his book). It’s a cute story and would be even cuter if it had happened to him. In reality it happened to Robert Altman.

[remarks via gawker.tv]