Late night host Jay Leno on Thursday said the sign-language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial accused of being a fake should win a Golden Globe.
The interpreter, Thamsanqa Jantjie, told a Johannesburg radio station he is schizophrenic and that he was hallucinating during the ceremony.
{mosads}”So at least there was a simple explanation for what went wrong,” Leno joked. “For a minute there I thought there might have been some security problems.”
Leno played a clip from the Golden Globes press conference that listed the nominees for best male actor, but Leno added Jantjie in for his performance in the movie “The Interpreter.”
The late night star then used the debacle as way to bash the National Security Agency for invading the privacy of Americans.
“So let me get this straight, the NSA is listening in our phone calls, but no one is checking in on the violent schizophrenic who was 18 inches away from the president of the United Sates,” he said. “How does that work?”