On November 21, 2001, Rodney Dangerfield appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to celebrate his 80th birthday. After performing stand-up, Dangerfield sat down for a brief chat with Leno, which was basically an extension of his stage routine. Leno then brought out Jim Carrey as a surprise, and he and Dangerfield reminisced about their days doing stand-up together. When Carrey told him how inspiring it was to see him still performing, Dangerfield asked, “What am I gonna do at my age?” The last thing Carrey said to him on the air that night was, “I don’t know, but I know CPR, so don’t worry about it. I can get you through the show.”
It was a strange, almost prescient thing to say. If Carrey made that remark because he suspected something was wrong with Dangerfield, he wasn’t the only one. Before Carrey got to the stage, Leno thought Dangerfield looked a little off. While Dangerfield was performing, Leno asked his producer to call a paramedic, just to be safe.
Leno had to stall Dangerfield in his dressing room for a bit until somebody was able to take a look at him. According to Leno, they found out that Dangerfield had suffered a mini-stroke. The paramedic told him that if he hadn’t called, Dangerfield might have ended up having a severe heart attack. Leno didn’t think he’d really done much, but he did say in 2019, “I felt like I helped save somebody from some horrible thing that might have happened.”
Although that quote was from well after the fact, it was almost as strange as Carrey’s CPR comment because several outlets back in 2001 reported that Dangerfield actually did have a heart attack the day after his November 21 appearance on Leno’s show. Both the Los Angeles Times and ABC News cited Dangerfield’s publicist, Warren Cowan, as the source of the information. By all accounts, it was only a mild heart attack, but still an odd thing for Leno to leave out when discussing it years later.
Dangerfield died in 2004 due to complications following heart surgery. You can watch his 80th birthday celebration with Carrey and Leno from The Tonight Show below.
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