I can think of few people more sue-able than Jay Leno. Not because he's done anything worth getting sued over (although did you hear about the time he murdered a nun on the steps of a church?), but rather just because I want him not to be fantastically wealthy anymore, because all of his riches are based on a foundation of lies. That lie, of course, being that he has any talent anywhere inside his horrible, bloated body, which rots eternally but is kept rigid by the infernal energy of the Stone of Amatoth, a gift from his nefarious master, the demon K'thul, who created it from the blood of a thousand virgins on the thirteenth night of the thirteenth month of the ancient calendar.
That last part might just be gossip, though.
Anyway, the man is not funny, and I say that without any of my usual disclaimers on the subjective nature of humor. A few days ago he decided to demonstrate his utter disdain for his Tonight Show audience by trotting out a picture of the Golden Temple in the Punjab of India and claiming that it was Mitt Romney's summer home. For the Euros out there, Romney is one of our Presidential candidates who, well, has a lot of money, and the Golden Palace is a large and opulent-looking building, and so, ha ha, it looks like a rich guy would live there. Stop, please, I can't breathe because I'm laughing so hard.
You know who's not laughing so hard? Sikhs. The building is considered holy by many Sikhs, and many of them have taken a bit of umbrage to Leno's lame attempt at comedy. And if you've ever read any military history, you'll know that you don't want to piss off a Sikh, as those guys are among the baddest bad-asses of the last few centuries of warfare. Leno's lucky that, at the moment, the Sikhs are content with complaining; India's foreign ministry has apparently lodged a formal complaint with the U.S. State Department.
Taking matters a bit further is Dr Randeep Dhillon, a Californian who's decided to actually file a libel lawsuit against Leno, alleging that his remark "clearly exposes plaintiff, other sikhs and their religion to hatred, contempt, ridicule and obloquy because it falsely portrays the holiest place in the Sikh religion as a vacation resort owned by a non-Sikh."
That lawsuit will, of course, go nowhere, as the libel laws in the U.S. are not nearly as restrictive as they are in, say, the U.K., and even if Leno wanted to openly mock the Sikh religion, that'd still be constitutionally-protected speech, if in poor taste. So Jay Leno will continue to plague the airwaves with his increasingly generic, mom-safe brand of chuckles. My advice to him is to really push some buttons and incorporate an impersonator of the Prophet Muhammad into a few sketches here and there and see what happens. You know, just...just to see what'd happen.
