Jay Leno pantomimes dodging an oven, Mel Gibson amused

One of the things that’s always made me somewhat pro-Mel Gibson is that for all his private ranting, he was almost always charming and fairly charismatic and seemingly self-aware when he appeared in public. His Kimmel appearance a couple years ago comes to mind. But Gibson recently appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and if the guy actually doesn’t hate Jews, you have to wonder why he showed up wearing cowboy boots. FACT: No one who wears cowboy boots likes Jews†. Even worse, he wasn’t the joking, positive Mel Gibson we’re used to seeing. He opened with “at least when you guys are going to tape me, you let me know that you’re going to do that!” It might not have been a bad joke if it didn’t look like he wanted to murder someone while he was saying it. Later he starts doing that heavy breathing thing into the microphone, and even though he’s obviously trying hard to make it seem light and breezy, you can practically see Joe Eszterhas getting stabbed in the face with an antler inside Mel’s thought bubble.

“Has it really come to the place where you can’t blow off steam in your own home, even if you’re justified?”

Blowing off steam? Dude, if Hitler was alive, he’d be like “easy, bro, you’re gonna blow an o-ring.”

“If he (Eszterhas) put half as much time and effort and creativity and imagination into a screenplay, which he was supposed to write, as he did into that letter, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“It’s kind of like you build a house, you hire a guy to put a roof on it, he comes over and eats lunch and talks about the roof, and then you get rained on all night. Wouldn’t you be kind of peeved?”

“He finally [wrote a script after 15 months] and it was so bad that Warners rejected it, so I guess he’s trying to cover up.”

Uhhhh… the people who hired Joe Eszterhas: had they seen Showgirls?

“Maybe you haven’t heard this about me, but I have a bit of a temper.”

“It was a writer thing [the Costa Rica retreat]. That guy started nine months after, I already got four drafts. That’s Randy Wallace, we’re doing a Viking movie.”

It’s not so much anything he says so much as the scary way he breathes into the microphone and gets all manic and fidgety after everything he says. I don’t know if he’s hurt any actual people yet, but at the very least I’d be hiding my totem poles.

†Except for of course my Jewish Frotcast co-host Ben, who owns cowboy boots AND rides a motorcycle.