In 1995, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno started beating David Letterman’s Late Show in the weekly ratings after nearly two years of head-to-head competition. Though several reasons have been given for Leno’s sudden success, many have attributed it to the fact that Leno often made jokes about the O.J. Simpson murder trial that began earlier that year.
Whether that had anything to do with it would be hard to determine, but a 2014 study found that Leno targeted Simpson more than any other celebrity during his time hosting The Tonight Show. Between 1992 and 2014, Leno made jokes about Simpson 795 times; only Michael Jackson came close, with a reported 505 jokes aimed at the pop superstar.
Although Leno acknowledged that he may have crossed the line with his Simpson material on at least one occasion, he defended his jokes by pointing out that they weren’t at the expense of the victims. “We’ve never mentioned Nicole Brown. We’ve never mentioned Ron Goldman. We’ve barely mentioned murder,” Leno told the Los Angeles Times in April 1995.
“You will say, ‘at the crime scene,’ or ‘the night the crime happened,’” he continued. To give you an idea of the types of sketches they would do on The Tonight Show back then, here’s a parody of the Friends intro featuring the lawyers from the Simpson trial:
Jay Leno’s O.J. Simpson Story Has One Pretty Big Timeline Problem
In a 2024 interview from Dr. Phil LIVE! with Adam Ray, Leno revealed that his many jokes directed at Simpson weren’t his only connection to the disgraced football player. According to Leno, he’d gone to a private screening of Jurassic Park that Simpson also happened to be at on June 10, 1994—two nights before the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.
In attendance alongside Simpson that evening was Nicole, whom Simpson would later be accused of stabbing to death. Simpson was acquitted of the murders in October 1995.
However, as was the case with Seth Rogen’s assertion that scenes from Superbad were filmed half a block from where Nicole and Ron Goldman’s murders took place, Leno appears to have his story a little bit twisted here. You see, Jurassic Park actually premiered in theaters in June 1993, whereas the murders occurred in June of the following year. This, of course, doesn’t mean Leno was lying about watching the movie with the couple, but if it was Jurassic Park as he remembered it, the screening in question certainly wasn’t two days prior to the victims’ deaths.
You can take a look at Leno’s recollection of things right here:
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