Last night, Leno decided to do his painful and unfunny “10@10” celebrity-question bit with Jimmy Kimmel, who recently did an entire Jimmy Kimmel Live show “as” Jay Leno, complete with gray-haired wig, fake chin, and whiny voice.

Watch the video here.

Kimmel dismantled Leno on Leno’s own show. It was brutal, sharp, and hilarious.

The real problem for NBC is that Leno, after 18 years on The Tonight Show and 40 years in comedy clubs, had absolutely no idea how to handle Kimmel. Leno looked like Sarah Palin in a chemistry class. He was wooden or robotic, and clearly fuming at the very idea that a guest on his show was not in love with him. Leno seems to think he’ll be welcomed like Jack Paar returning to Tonight after a six-week censorship battle in 1960.

This one segment, alone, shows that either O’Brien or Kimmel is far, far more qualified to be a late night host in 2010 than Jay Leno. And the shits for NBC is that they apparently signed Leno to a new Tonight Show contract just hours before this was filmed, so they’re now stuck trying to unshit the bed. And they are trying, as Salon notes about this very clip:

Not that we’re conspiracy theorists or anything, but we note NBC’s clip of the whole fantastic contretemps … cuts off after the first minute. The link on Hulu (which worked this morning!) says it’s “currently unavailable.”

It’s working now—but cuts off after one minute, perhaps to try to pretend Leno didn’t just get his ass and ego handed to him on his own overpriced set. He could have walked away a hero by publicly refusing his old show, and now he’s going to destroy The Tonight Show with a chin full of hubris. Conan saw it coming and rightly said, “don’t get me involved in this.”

Go Coco.