Leno Gets Edgy: New Promo Vid Shows Off His Dark Side
This past Sunday I was forced to sit through numerous horror-movie previews before my showing of District 9 — but only one made me laugh. It was the one starring Jay Leno.
Wait, what?
It’s true! I enjoyed his clip about accidentally killing someone and hiding the body much more than the horror movie clip about accidentally killing someone and hiding the body. (I prefer the sorority sisters in Legally Blonde.)
The clip stars SNL’s Fred Armisen and has a Guy Ritchie/Blair Witch feel to it. “Jaywalking” this is not. Also, it’s funny!
James Hibberd at THR’s The Live Feed got the video from NBC (we asked; it was not online as far as we could tell earlier this week) and reports that the ad is “currently running on more than 15,000 screens (but only before movies with a PG-13 or R rating, NBC has a tamer Leno clip reel ad for kiddie films).” Watch it below:
If this is any indication of the kind of material he’s working on, it bodes very well for his show. As it is, Leno has managed to smartly showcase a different side of himself for the kind of audience that let’s just say is not in his sweet spot (anecdotally, I can say that the Venn Diagram between “People excited about District 9” and “People excited about Jay Leno” has very little overlap). 15,000 is a lot of screens, and if NBC puts this video wide (YouTube, Hulu, on the actual JAY LENO SITE, maybe?) there’s no reason it won’t go viral. Slow August, buzzy video, making a guy dig his own grave. Good stuff. Let’s see if they show as much savvy in how they release it online.
