Who is ‘Miss Atomic Bomb?': How one man's obsession solved 68-year-old mystery behind iconic photo
It would take him more than two decades to unravel the mystery of Lee A. Merlin's true identity.
Friedrichs, 81, isn't a detective. He's a historian and a retired scientist who got his start during the atomic age, a complicated moment in American history when the line was blurred between fear and fascination with nuclear power.
5 Anna Lee Mahoney, also known as Miss Atomic Bomb, is pictured in one of the most famous pop-culture images of the aboveground nuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site.
AP
Between 1951 and 1992, hundreds of nuclear tests were performed, mostly underground, in the desert outside Las Vegas. But it was the massive mushroom clouds from the above-ground nuclear blasts that captured the public's imagination throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.
Las Vegas sought to capitalize on that craze, and in 1957 sent a photographer out on assignment to shoot a promotional ad for nuclear tourism. He got an idea to capture the lead dancer at the Sands Hotel in a swimsuit in the shape of a fluffy mushroom cloud. In the photo, the high-heeled showgirl is smiling with arms outstretched as the desert unfolds behind her like a stage.
The image played a key role in shaping Las Vegas's identity as a city of fantasy and spectacle. Yet little was known about the star of the photo — until now.
Chasing clues
Friedrich first set out to find Miss Atomic Bomb around 2000.
The Atomic Museum was set to open in Las Vegas in a few years, and as a founding member, he was 'hoping against hope' that she was still alive and could attend the grand opening.
What started as a simple question — Who was she? — became an obsession for Friedrichs that outlasted careers and outlived friends.
Friedrichs filled stacks of binders with clues and potential leads, like one that led him 'to a guy in South Dakota.' Days off were spent either combing through online newspaper archives or sifting through special collections at the library.
5 Robert Friedrichs (left) first set out to find Miss Atomic Bomb around 2000.
KSNV/News2LV
He tracked down the photographer from that famous photoshoot and interviewed former showgirls who confirmed Miss Atomic Bomb's stage name. But the woman's real name still eluded him.
Leads dried up, and months turned into years.
The mystery didn't keep him up at night, but he said when he was awake, it consumed his thoughts. He would sometimes stare at the photo, wondering if she'd ever give up the answer.
Then, last winter, something unexpected happened. He gave a talk at the Atomic Museum about his search, and the next day, an audience member sent him a copy of an obituary. A detail stood out: The woman had once been the lead dancer at the Sands Hotel.
5 Las Vegas sought to capitalize on the massive mushroom clouds from the above-ground nuclear blasts that had people in a craze, and in 1957 sent a photographer out on assignment to shoot a promotional ad for nuclear tourism.
Getty Images
Her name was Anna Lee Mahoney.
Beyond the stage name
She was born on Aug. 14, 1927, in the Bronx. Mahoney trained in ballet in New York before performing in shows and musicals under her stage name, Lee A. Merlin.
By 1957, she was the lead dancer at the Sands Hotel's Copa showroom, a frequent haunt of the Rat Pack and mobsters. She performed for elite audiences, including Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong, according to her obituary.
After hanging up her dancing shoes, Mahoney worked for 30 years as a mental health counselor, moved to Hawaii, and got married.
She died in 2001 in Santa Cruz, California, after a battle with cancer.
Her photograph is one of the most requested of the 7.5 million images kept in the Las Vegas Convention Center and Visitors Authority's archive. It has inspired Halloween costumes, and former Playboy Bunny Holly Madison recreated it in 2012. One of the outtakes from the famous shoot appears in the background of an episode of 'Crime Story,' a police TV drama set in the 1960s.
'It's just really amazing that one click of the shutter could have such an impact,' Friedrichs said.
A temporary exhibit showcasing the decades-long search opens June 13 at the Atomic Museum.
'It's about Miss Atomic Bomb, about Anna Lee Mahoney,' said Joseph Kent, the museum's deputy director and curator, 'but it's also about Robert's quest to find out her real identity.'
New friends and old stories
Over the years, the project had become deeply personal for Friedrichs.
He and the photographer, Don English, became fast friends after their first meeting. Before the Atomic Museum opened to the public, Friedrichs took English inside to tour the space. English brought the original camera he used to take the infamous photo.
5 Mahoney's photograph is one of the most requested of the 7.5 million images kept in the Las Vegas Convention Center and Visitors Authority's archive, according to reports.
Corbis via Getty Images
English posed in the lobby for a photo with a life-sized cardboard cutout of 'Miss Atomic Bomb.' Friedrichs jokes it's his favorite of all the photos he's collected of her in 25 years.
English died in 2006, long before Friedrichs solved the mystery. Instead, he called English's daughter to share the news.
'She was really excited that we had gotten this put to bed,' Friedrichs said.
And then there were the showgirls who spent hours talking with Friedrichs. They shared their stage names and stories about vintage Vegas — fancy dinners, photoshoots, and lavish gifts like a beautiful citrine ring that one of them got from a man who wanted to marry her.
The women provided a glimpse into the atomic era, life as Copa showgirls, and how they became icons of Las Vegas, yet were sometimes misidentified in photo captions or their names altogether omitted.
5 One of the exhibition halls at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas.
Corbis via Getty Images
And finally, with the help of private investigators who donated their time, Friedrichs uncovered conclusive evidence linking all of Miss Atomic Bomb's names to a single Social Security number.
'It's something I always hoped would be completed in my lifetime,' said Friedrichs, teary-eyed.
His motivation to solve the mystery didn't come from curiosity alone. The missing name was a gap in the historical record, he said, and he wanted to fix it.
'It's sort of like knowing someone was the first president of the United States, but what was his name again?'
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Atlantic
4 hours ago
- Atlantic
Why No One Knows What's Happening Tonight
About a year and a half ago, I was scheduled to play a concert in Vermont when word came that the gig would be canceled due to an approaching nor'easter. I checked out of the hotel early, lobbed my suitcase into the rental car, and hightailed it to New York as menacing clouds darkened the rearview mirror. Brooklyn had been home for the better part of two decades, but after a move to the Pacific Northwest, I was returning as a tourist, and the show's cancellation augured a rare free evening in the city. There was just one problem: How was I going to figure out what to do with my night on the town? This used to be easy. You grabbed The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Out New York, or The Village Voice and checked out the event listings. When I graduated from college and moved to the city in 2003, Time Out quickly became my bible, syllabus, and road map. The listings guided me through the cobwebbed bowels of St. Mark's Church and into the Ontological-Hysteric Theater hidden within, where Richard Foreman's mind-bending plays made an indelible impression on me. The listings brought me to Southpaw to hear Neko Case's bloodshot voice; to the Village Vanguard for Jason Moran or Paul Motian; and to a tin-ceilinged basement bar in Park Slope, where I saw a baby-faced Sharon Van Etten sing her earliest songs, and then bashfully hand out CDs burned with her demos, rich with high-frequency hiss from the tape deck onto which she'd recorded them. But over the past decade, event listings have all but disappeared. The New York Times killed its weekly arts listings at the end of 2016, and its online arts-and-entertainment guide remains frozen, like a butterfly pinned and dried, in March 2020: 'New York Arts Institutions Closed Because of Coronavirus' reads the top headline. The Village Voice folded in 2018. (It has recently been revived but has no listings section to speak of.) The New Yorker 's Goings On About Town section was slashed in 2023 to just a page or two, now offering one recommendation per discipline. And Time Out, that veritable doorstop of weekly listings, now previews one or two concerts a month. From the June 2025 issue: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture? This is, in part, a familiar story about declining ad revenue, about changing pressures and priorities in the journalism business. When listings began to disappear, many imagined that the internet would simply fill the void—that artists and their fans (as well as nonprofit institutions and their audiences) would find new ways to connect. But a world in which clicks are dollars has led to an ouroboros of cultural journalism in which what is already popular must be written about—which increases its popularity, which means it must be written about, which increases its popularity—and a social-media ecosystem in which artists, no longer able to rely on legacy media for visibility, must create content to please an algorithm instead of their fans or themselves. As mainstream culture grows ever narrower, once-robust subcultures are struggling for survival. Perhaps social-media influencers are today's critics and curators, but even as our feeds promise 'discovery,' they mostly serve us what we already like. We have no idea what we're missing. The listings were my lodestar. And that star's orbit was maintained, at least in part, by a journalist named Steve Smith. Smith was a music editor at Time Out New York from 2001 to 2014. He'd gotten his start at a classical radio station in Houston, introducing Brahms symphonies by day and playing in a rock band in biker bars—he was the drummer—by night. This stylistic mishmash would become a trademark of his sensibility. When we spoke last month, Smith mentioned Karlheinz Stockhausen; the Clash; Billy Idol; John Zorn; John Coltrane; Scandinavian metal; Kronos Quartet; Kiss; Steve Reich; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and Beethoven—all within the first 10 minutes of our conversation. Time Out 'was a magazine that was basically nothing but the listings,' Smith told me. 'Nobody said, 'Oh, that obscure thing that's happening on a loading dock in Tribeca? No, that's too weird.' I was basically told, 'List what's interesting; list what people will want to know about.'' A coveted red asterisk denoted a critic's pick. 'I had the privilege,' he said, 'of making a difference in the lives of a number of composers and performers. And that, to me, was the most gratifying piece of the job.' One of the lives he changed was mine. The first review I ever received as a singer-songwriter, for a set at Tonic, was written by Smith, for his blog Night After Night. A 33-word listing in Time Out came soon after—a blurb that would remain in my press kit for years. In 2009, he interviewed me for a New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure profile. The morning after the story ran, Lincoln Center called my manager and offered me a debut on its American Songbook performance series. Who reviewed that concert for the Times? None other than Steve Smith. These listings weren't just a boon for artists like me—they were also a teeth-cutting opportunity for cub journalists, one that demanded brutal concision. Smith, a master of the miniature, stood on the shoulders of those such as Robert Christgau, a longtime Village Voice music editor and the self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics. About a Patti Smith show, from the April 7, 1975, issue: 'Funny, frightening, and just polished enough, Smith shifts from rock and roll to poetry reading like someone who really believes in street literature.' In its heyday, the Voice 's newsroom reverberated with the chaotic counterpoint of freaky choristers, all covering New York City with an obsessive commitment to hyperlocalism: Scenesters haunted hardcore shows at warehouses in Brooklyn; theater nerds ventured to East Village basements for experimental one-acts; dance lovers frequented Lower East Side nightclubs to cover bawdy performance art and contortionist spectacles. Here was a newspaper that, through dogged documentation of small and sometimes-fragile artistic microclimates, came to wield wide-reaching influence over national aesthetic trends as it championed unknown artists like Smith, the Talking Heads, Philip Glass, and so many others. That New York media have turned away from the local in favor of established celebrities may ultimately result in its irrelevance. Sixteen years after that first profile in the Times, I am fortunate to still be making a living playing music. But mine was a transitional generation: I came of age just in time to benefit from the old models and media apparatuses, only to watch them crumble around me. Few emerging musicians today could dream of a two-sentence blurb previewing a Monday-night set at a small club on the Lower East Side, let alone a thousand-word profile. The demise of listings is 'tangled up with the erosion of review coverage,' the jazz critic Nate Chinen told me, while stressing that 'the fundamental utility of a publication is bringing people out' to see a gig: 'The immediate danger is that artists play and people don't know about it.' Chinen would know. He wrote the jazz listings at The New York Times from 2005 until 2016. Those blurbs, he understood, could mean the difference between a standing-room-only show and one where the musicians outnumbered the audience. Today, it's harder than ever for aesthetically adventurous artists to make ends meet. Some have left the business, and others limp along, subsidizing their income with teaching gigs and odd jobs. Meanwhile, pop stars are doing great. The decline of listings followed the broader trend toward 'poptimism,' a critical movement that began as a corrective to the white-male-dominated popular-music journalism of the late 20th century. In a now-canonic broadside published in 2004, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argued that the snobbery of those white-male critics was bathed in racism and sexism, and often resulted in the neglect of music by women and people of color. Poptimists believed that music that was actually popular—the guilty-pleasure radio hits we wail in the car, many of them performed by nonwhite, nonmale artists—ought to be treated with the same reverence granted to the art rockers. Fair enough! But what Sanneh and like-minded critics could not have anticipated was the extent to which their goal would collide with the economic imperatives of internet-based journalism. In the 21 years since Sanneh's essay was published, poptimism has become the status quo in mainstream music criticism, reaching its apotheosis in 2023 with USA Today 's hiring of a full-time Taylor Swift reporter, Bryan West, who would go on to file—you may want to sit down— 501 articles about Swift during her Eras Tour. In such a climate, it's easy to forget that poptimism was once driven by the impulse to lift up marginalized voices. Indeed, much of today's cultural coverage reflects a different societal more, one in which, as the political philosopher Michael J. Sandel has written, we measure the value of people's contributions to the common good solely by 'the market value of the goods or services they sell.' In other words, covering what's popular doesn't just serve journalism's economic bottom line; it also expresses our beliefs. In a society in which dignity and status accrue to the powerful, it's no wonder that outlets once dedicated to nurturing subcultures now publish endless paeans to celebrities. A reader might object: Aren't you just complaining about the cultural version of natural selection? If niche genres can't hack it in today's algorithm-driven world, maybe they deserve extinction. But if they are allowed to die, popular music will also suffer. The terms highbrow and lowbrow conceal a broader ecology in which the raw materials of art move easily from one genre to another. Classical composers have long ransacked folk music to furnish their symphonies with great tunes. Similarly, there would be no Beatles' White Album without Karlheinz Stockhausen's tape music, no Rosalía's Motomami without the vocal arrangements of the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Caroline Shaw. If we want the next Billie Eilish to be able to work with the next Attacca Quartet, we should ensure that lesser-known artists enjoy a bare minimum of support. To look at a page of event previews was to understand how a collection of artists related to one another. This, according to the opera critic Olivia Giovetti, was one of Smith's great gifts as an editor. 'He crafted listings,' Giovetti told me, 'in such a way that drew out and illuminated the connections between artists, so that the reader came to understand that if they enjoyed that Victoire show at Le Poisson Rouge, they might also dig a yMusic concert at Rockwood Music Hall.' You may not have heard of either group, but you likely know the Metropolitan Opera, where Victoire's founder, Missy Mazzoli, is headed with her adaptation of George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, and you've probably heard of Paul Simon, who tapped yMusic to join him on his farewell tour in 2018. The loss of listings is, in this sense, the loss of a whole world, which historians, too, will have to contend with. Take any issue of The New Yorker from the first 98 years of its existence, and the Goings On About Town section offers a rich snapshot of the city and its subcultures. The same was true of the Times. 'On any given day,' Chinen told me, 'there would be a review of a New York–based dance company at the Joyce Theater, a Ben Ratliff review about a koto player at Issue Project Room, Jon Pareles reviewing an indie-folk artist at Joe's Pub. It was this incredibly robust account of a thriving arts community in a city that, right or wrong, considers itself to be the center of the universe. That's the garden. That's the plant mix that existed.' How will historians write the story of a city that no longer maintains a record of its own cultural life? In this new paradigm, I, like so many others, feel shackled to my Instagram account, resentful that it has become my personal marketing and public-relations departments, yet resigned to its relative efficacy as a mouthpiece. (I tried to opt out, taking a full year off from the internet and another six months away from social media, returning only when my manager begged me to do so. 'The phone has stopped ringing,' he said bluntly.) So yes, amid the gallimaufry of links, photos, and screen caps, I post bite-size songs: here, a William Carlos Williams–inspired lament for the tariff-burdened penguins of Heard Island; there, a setting of a Craigslist ad for free reptiles. A lot of my work is sober and politically minded, but I think it's important to hold on to laughter and absurdity too. Still, those miniature tunes, delivered algorithmically, often bypass my own Instagram followers, landing instead in the feeds of total strangers. For them, these songs are divorced from the broader footprint of my work, which has included oratorios about homelessness and railway travelogues documenting a divided America. Cultural journalism once created that context. Spencer Kornhaber: Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues What's to be done? Performing-arts institutions could work together to underwrite their own weekly listings website or print publication, with their financial contributions scaled according to their budget so that small operations aren't left out. Sure, there would be challenges, namely a blurring of the line between advertising and editorial. Ideally, a group of writers and editors would produce listings with total independence, shielded from pressure by funders. The other solution—plausible or not—is for outlets such as the Times and The New Yorker to reverse course: to recognize that their listings were a public good serving artists, audiences, and arts presenters alike. The societal benefit of a comprehensive guide to the cultural sector can't be readily calculated on a balance sheet. For now, Smith is still serving as the secretary, the minute keeper, the town historian for the creative-music community in New York. After Time Out, he spent two years at The Boston Globe as an arts editor, and then bounced between various jobs covering music back in the city, including a five-year stint writing listings for The New Yorker. He's now a copywriter at an arts institution. Still, he maintains a Substack newsletter, Night After Night, which shares the name of his old blog, the one on which he gave me my first review. Each week, Smith compiles a roundup of notable events in music that lives beyond that narrow mainstream. When I asked him when he returned to writing listings, he said, 'I never really stopped.' Although a comprehensive digital archive of Time Out does not exist, The New Yorker is searchable back to its inaugural issue, published in February 1925. Like any good elder-Millennial narcissist, I did a quick search of my name to look for its first mention in Goings On About Town. There it was, in the issue for April 27, 2009. What else was happening? That week, Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin were starring in a production of Waiting for Godot; Steve Wilson was at the Village Vanguard; Judy Collins was at Café Carlyle; Carnegie Hall featured appearances by Zakir Hussain, Kronos Quartet (playing the compositions of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Osvaldo Golijov), and the soon-to-be opera superstar Eric Owens; Chick Corea was leading an all-star band at Lincoln Center; and Lou Reed was holding court at the Gramercy Theatre.
Atlantic
5 hours ago
- Atlantic
A Gritty and Genuinely Readable Book
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Welcome back to The Daily's Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what's keeping them entertained. Today's special guest is Luis Parrales, an assistant editor who has written about what the border-hawk Catholics get wrong and why the papacy is no ordinary succession. Luis is a new fan of the author Mario Vargas Llosa and a longtime listener of the singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler. His other recommendations include 'Femininomenon,' by Chappell Roan; The Bear; and anything by Conan O'Brien—whom he deems 'the king of American comedy.' The Culture Survey: Luis Parrales Best novel I've recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa before his death, in April, besides some high-level lore—his role in the Latin American Boom, his failed presidential bid, the time he socked Gabriel García Márquez in the face. Soon after, I decided enough was enough and picked up his historical novel The Feast of the Goat, published in 2000. Through the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic until his assassination at the hands of revolutionaries, in 1961, Vargas Llosa explores how the wounds inflicted by a dictatorship remain long after it officially ends. But as gritty and dark as the novel gets—and it gets dark — The Feast of the Goat is one of the most readable books I've ever encountered. That's both because Vargas Llosa's crisp prose makes the 400 or so pages fly by and, more important, because his novel never loses sight of the power of human resilience. I was a bit more familiar with the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who also passed away earlier this year. Although best known for his 1981 book, After Virtue (if you haven't already, read David Brooks's reflections on how its arguments help explain President Donald Trump's appeal), MacIntyre also wrote Dependent Rational Animals. The book offers one of the most persuasive cases I've read against treating individual autonomy as the highest ideal, as well as a plea to view our limitations—aging, illness—and dependence on one another not as failings but as constitutive elements of human nature. Oh, and MacIntyre dedicates long stretches of his book to the intelligence of dolphins. Which is great. A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Quiet: 'If I Don't Hear From You Tonight,' by Courtney Barnett. Loud: 'Femininomenon,' by Chappell Roan. Something I recently rewatched: Before earning box-office cachet with the Dune series, Denis Villeneuve directed Incendies, a modern Sophoclean tragedy set during a civil war in the Middle East. Nearly 15 years after its release, the film remains one of the most sobering portrayals of familial ties on-screen—of how they can at once inflict unspeakable pain and inspire courage and selflessness. The television show I'm most enjoying right now: The latest season of FX's exquisite The Bear. The last thing that made me snort with laughter: For my money, Conan O'Brien is the king of American comedy, though part of his greatness is that he's always reveled in playing the fool. He doesn't have the commanding swagger of a Dave Chappelle or Bill Burr, opting instead for a style that my colleague David Sims has described as a 'mix of silly surrealism with an old-timey flair.' I've been keeping up with O'Brien since his Late Night days, when I would get home from school and play the previous night's episode, so watching him get the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor earlier this year felt plenty nostalgic. The full ceremony is on Netflix now, and it's a comedic cornucopia for any Team Coco stans. The last thing that made me cry: A few weeks before Independence Day, while visiting New York City, I ended up going to mass at Ascension Church, which has a jazz liturgy on Sunday evenings. Most of my favorite church music leans traditional, yet to my surprise, I felt incredibly moved by the unconventional reverence of melodies with echoes of Art Blakey and Miles Davis. One highlight: the jazz mass's version of the hymn 'This Is My Song.' These lines in particular felt providentially relevant for anybody searching for a more warmhearted patriotism: This is my home, the country where my heart is; here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine; but other hearts in other lands are beating with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine. The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Museo Nacional de Historia, in Mexico City. A musical artist who means a lot to me: The Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler isn't super well known in America—though he did write the first Spanish-language song to win an Oscar for Best Original Song—but he's pretty acclaimed in Latin America and Spain, especially for his lyricism. He can use scientific principles (the law of conservation or the evolution of cells, for example) as metaphors for love, or meditate on weighty political questions (migration, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) without coming off as preachy. No musician means more to me than Drexler, whose art teems with the wonder of a wide-eyed humanist. Only I discern— Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn. Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: The Week Ahead The Naked Gun, an action-comedy film starring Liam Neeson as a hapless yet determined detective (in theaters Friday) Season 2 of Twisted Metal, a postapocalyptic action-comedy series with murderous clowns and a deadly demolition tournament (premiering Thursday on Peacock) Black Genius, an essay collection by Tre Johnson that identifies overlooked examples of genius in the Black community (out Tuesday) Essay The Mistake Parents Make With Chores Each September at the Montessori school I run, the preschoolers engage in an elaborate after-lunch cleanup routine. They bustle through the room with sweepers and tiny dustpans, spreading crumbs all over the floor and making a bigger mess than they started with … Contrast this with my own house—where, in a half-hearted effort to encourage my children to take responsibility for our home, I've been known to say, 'You live here!' as they ignore the pile of dishes in the sink. After years in Montessori classrooms, I assumed that a culture of taking responsibility would develop spontaneously in my family. And it might have, had I not made some early mistakes. More in Culture Catch Up on The Atlantic Finally, a Democrat who could shine on Joe Rogan's show Trump's Epstein denials are ever so slightly unconvincing, Jonathan Chait writes. ChatGPT gave instructions for murder, self-mutilation, and devil worship. Photo Album planned wedding date.
New York Post
5 hours ago
- New York Post
Jay Leno criticizes modern late-night comedy for alienating half the audience with partisan politics
Jay Leno reflected on why he always kept his jokes politically balanced while hosting 'The Tonight Show' for over two decades. The 75-year-old comedian recently sat down for an interview with David Trulio, the president and CEO of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, during which he was questioned about his approach to political humor. 'I read that there was an analysis done of your work on 'The Tonight Show' for the 22 years and that your jokes were roughly equally balanced between going after Republicans and taking aim at Democrats. Did you have a strategy?' Trulio asked. 'It was fun to me when I got hate letters [like] 'Dear Mr. Leno, you and your Republican friends' and 'Well, Mr. Leno, I hope you and your Democratic buddies are happy' — over the same joke,' Leno recalled. 'And I go, 'Well, that's good,'' he said. 'That's how you get a whole audience.' Leno went on to note how late-night comedy has changed amid the current divisive political landscape. 'Now you have to be content with half the audience because you have [to] give your opinion,' Leno said. 7 Jay Leno hosts 'The Tonight Show with Jay Leno' on Nov. 5, 2012. AP When Trulio asked if Leno had any advice for comedians today, the 'Jay Leno's Garage' host referred to his longtime friendship with late comedy legend Rodney Dangerfield. 'I knew Rodney 40 years,' he said. 'I have no idea if he was Democrat or Republican. We never discussed [it], we just discussed jokes.' 'And to me, I like to think that people come to a comedy show to kind of get away from the things, you know, the pressures of life, whatever it might be,' Leno continued. 'And I love political humor, don't get me wrong, but it's just what happens when people wind up cozying too much to one side or the other.' 7 Jay Leno rides his vintage 1910 Model O-O White Steam Car on July 14, 2025. Snorlax / MEGA 7 Jay Leno appears on 'The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon' on June 15, 2016. Getty Images While speaking with Trulio, Leno discussed how comedy could be used to create common ground. 'Funny is funny,' Leno said. 'It's funny when someone who's not….when you make fun of their side and they laugh at it, you know, that's kind of what I do.' 'I just find getting out — I don't think anybody wants to hear a lecture,' he continued. 'When I was with Rodney, it was always in the economy of words — get to the joke as quickly as possible.' 7 The New York Post front cover on July 27, 2025. Trulio pointed out that both Leno and Dangerfield achieved massive success during their careers, noting the two's 'approach worked in the marketplace.' 'Well, why shoot for just half an audience all the time? You know, why not try to get the whole [audience],' Leno replied. 'I mean, I like to bring people into the big picture,' he explained. 'I don't understand why you would alienate one particular group, you know, or just don't do it at all. I'm not saying you have to throw your support or whatever, but just do what's funny.' 7 Stephen Colbert during a shooting of 'The Late Show' on June 25, 2025. Scott Kowalchyk/CBS 7 Jimmy Fallon hosts 'The Tonight Show' on Feb. 21, 2013. AP Leno's comments come amid the uproar that ensued after CBS announced on July 17 that it was canceling 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' with the show's final episode scheduled to air in May 2026. At the time, the network clarified that the cancellation was 'purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,' and noted, 'It is not related in any way to the show's performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.' Weeks ahead of the cancellation, CBS and Paramount paid President Donald Trump a $16 million settlement following his lawsuit against the news network for airing an edited interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 election. 7 Seth Meyers hosting 'Late Night with Seth Meyers' on Feb. 24, 2014. AP Colbert, who frequently blasts Trump on his show, criticized the settlement and described it as a 'big fat bribe' during an episode that aired days before the cancellation was announced. The host's supporters, including several politicians, have accused CBS and Paramount of canceling 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' for political reasons. Trump celebrated the news of the cancellation in a post on his platform Truth Social, which drew a fiery response from Colbert, who told the president 'Go f— yourself' during the opening monologue of his show on Monday. Several fellow late night show hosts and comedians have rallied around Colbert. 'The Tonight Show' host Jimmy Fallon and 'Late Night' host Seth Meyers, 'Last Week Tonight' host John Oliver and 'The Daily Show' host Jon Stewart attended Colbert's taping on Monday in a show of support. Stewart and Oliver previously worked alongside Colbert on 'The Daily Show.' On Friday, 'The Late Show' creator David Letterman slammed CBS' decision to cancel the long-running show as 'pure cowardice' and asserted that the network mistreated Colbert, who succeeded him as host in 2015. Fox News Digital's Gabriel Hays contributed to this report.
