Years after Jimmy Kimmel unleashed a public beatdown of Jay Leno on his own Tonight Show, Leno admits he had it coming. Not because Kimmel wasn’t an a-hole, but because Leno was dumb enough to book his rival in the first place.

“When Kimmel came on my show and humiliated me on my own show, I let it happen,” Leno confessed this week on In Depth with Graham Bensinger. “It was my mistake, I trusted somebody. I went, ‘Ah, I made a mistake. Okay, I should pay the price.’ And it's fine, it's fine.”

Here’s a reminder of what happened on that 2010 appearance. The year before, Leno turned over the reins of The Tonight Show to Conan O’Brien, only to grab them back months later when the show faltered in the ratings. Especially because Leno conspired to steal the Tonight Show job from David Letterman in the first place,...