Jay Leno showed off a "brand new face" when he appeared on "The Kelly Clarkson Show" this week.
Back in November, the former "Tonight Show" host sustained third-degree burns on his face, chest and hands when he was involved in a horrific car fire accident. On Wednesday, he sat down to chat about the incident with Clarkson.
"You look great though," she told Leno as he took a seat.
"This is a brand-new face," Leno quipped.
"It is; it’s unbelievable," he continued. "What happened, I was working on a car and I got a full face of gasoline, and it caught fire. And I had been eating a Flaming Hot Dorito, and when I bit into it, it set my face on."
Leno went on to describe the ordeal as "interesting."
"It was all third-degree burns, it was pretty bad. It was pretty bad," he added.
"You can’t tell at all," Clarkson responded.
"No, you think there’d be a zipper here or something," Leno joked. "No, this is like a brand-new face … only for the second time in my career am I the new face of comedy."
Shortly after the accident, Leno revealed what caused the car he was working on in his Los Angeles garage to burst into flames.
"It was a 1907 White Steam Car. The fuel line was clogged, so I was underneath it," he said of working on the vintage car during an appearance on "Today." "It sounded clogged and I said, ‘Blow some air through the line,' and so he did."
Leno said the fuel line made a noise, "and suddenly, boom, I got a face full of gas. And then the pilot light jumped and my face caught on fire."
Leno credited his friend Dave Killackey, who was with him at the time, for thinking fast and smothering the fire.
"And I said to my friend, I said, 'Dave, I’m on fire.' And Dave’s like, 'All right.' I said, 'No, Dave, I’m on fire.' And then, 'Oh, my God.' Dave, my friend, pulled me out and jumped on top of me and kind of smothered the fire," Leno said.
Leno spent 10 days at the Grossman Burn Center in California, where he underwent two skin graft surgeries for the burns he sustained and also received hyperbaric oxygen therapy. In a column for the The Wall Street Journal, Leno stressed that it was an accident.
"Anybody who works with their hands on a regular basis is going to have an accident at some point," he stated. "If you play football, you get a concussion or a broken leg. Anything you do, there's a risk factor."