Arsenio Hall and Jay Leno are more than just comedians.
The pair, who became friends while hosting competing late-night shows in the 1990s, once saved an elderly couple whose house caught on fire, according to Hall.
“There was a night when I’m at Jay Leno’s house after we come from working at the Comedy Store,” Hall told NPR’s “Fresh Air” recently.
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“And we’re standing in his yard, and he’s showing me stuff about his yard. He had a new house and a pool. And we see down the street there’s smoke coming from a house.”
He said Leno asked his wife to call 911.
“Jay and I run out the front door and sprint to the burning house,” Hall wrote about the incident in his new book, “Arsenio: A Memoir,” according to People.
“He presses the doorbell and I pound on the door. No one answers. In tandem, we kick the door and break it down.”
Hall wrote that they found the couple asleep in a back bedroom.
“‘You wake them up,’ I say to Jay. ‘They need to see you first, not a random Black guy standing over them,'” the “Arsenio Hall Show” host remembered. “We wake them up and lead them out of their house. A few minutes later, sirens wail and firefighters arrive.”
The comedian joked with NPR that he didn’t know anything about the couple but thought they “might have a different reaction to Jay saying, ‘Hey, it’s Jay Leno, wake up.’ You know?” rather than him.
Hall wrote that firefighters saved most of the couple’s home.
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Then, he wrote, the firefighters began to clap for the comedians, making him a little uncomfortable with the praise, “but the crazy thought does occur to me, ‘Tonight Jay Leno and I saved two lives.’”
He told NPR he’d forgotten about the story before he started researching his life for his memoir.
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Hall also told NPR he first met Leno at a Chicago comedy club, where Leno told him he should try to make it in Los Angeles “because you’ll never know if you have it unless you go out there. You don’t want to be a big fish in a little pond.”
Leno gave him his number and told him to call him when he arrived on the West Coast.
“So, he was like a big brother figure to me because he was already famous,” Hall told NPR. “And Jay and I have been to hell and back. We’ve been big brother, little brother. We’ve been competitors dogging each other in the press. And now we’re back to being partners on the road doing an act called Kings of Late Night.”
In an interview on Conan O’Brien’s podcast March 31, Hall described their relationship as “brothers.”
“And we fought too, me and Jay. We’re like Cain and Abel,” Hall admitted.
“Sometimes it sounds amazing and hard to believe, but I think I’ve just been blessed with an incredible life, which is why I was so cool after quitting the show with going home and chilling.”
