As we all know, Jay Leno is one of the greatest late night talk show hosts not only in our era, but since late night tv talk shows began.

But there seems to be something markedly different between the skits, gags, and conversation that he had on his show in comparison to late night talk show hosts now like Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Stephen Colbert.

Jay Leno shared his thoughts on what the problem is.

During an interview on the Today show, Al Roker asked Leno, “It’s been five years since you left The Tonight Show, and you see the place we are right now in this country. Do you miss being on the show, or is it such a different time that it would be hard to do?”

Leno replied,

“No, it’s different. I don’t miss it. You know, everything now is, if people don’t like your politics they… everyone has to know your politics. I tried to use Johnny’s model, and I would get hate mail from both sides equally and thought ‘well that’s fabulous, that’s exactly what I want’.

But when people see you as one-sided, it makes it tough. And, you know, I did it when Clinton was horny and Bush was dumb, and it was just a little easier.

Now it’s all very serious, I’d just like to see a bit of civility come back to it.

People say, ‘oh, it must be easy to do jokes with Trump’. It’s actually harder because the punchline of the joke used to be, ‘That’s like the president with a porn star.’ Well now the president is with a porn star, where do you go with that?

The theory when we watched the show was people just watched the news, we’ll make fun of the news and get your mind off the news.

Now people just want to be on the news all the time, you just have one subject, one topic every night. It makes it very tough. All the comics – Jimmy, Colbert, everybody else – it’s tough when that’s the only topic out there.”

I know we all feel the same way about current late night show hosts. I really used to enjoy watching them but you can’t watch one single night without someone taking a shot the President or Republicans, especially Jimmy Kimmel.

Photo Credit: President Barack Obama talks with Jay Leno during an interview on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” at the NBC Studios in Burbank, Calif., Oct. 25, 2011 (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)