Halle Berry was on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on 10/19, showing him pictures of her face distorted that she made on her Mac. She shows what a technological idiot she is by asking Jay if he’s hip and knows about this program Photobooth on the Mac where “you point the camera toward you, and it morphs your face into all these silly other people.” (That’s so Kai Power Tools circa 1996, but whatever.) She says she uses the program to mess with her face and cheer herself up when she’s feeling down. The first picture she shows is of herself with a distorted nose, blurting “‘This one, this is like my Jewish cousin!”

She then said “That’s mean!” Jay said “I’m glad you said it, ok great,” and she answered “OMG have I just like ruined my whole career?”

Here’s a video clip of that part of the show with the remark cut out.

Page Six reports that the audience was dead silent afterwards and that they added the laugh track afterwards when they cut out the “Jewish” part.

She was embarrassed after the show, realizing the enormous anti-semitic blunder she’d made, and then try to backtrack by saying her Jewish assistants thought it up, not her. She apologized to everyone, and asked The Tonight Show to cover her ass by cutting that remark, which they did:

According to one audience member, “She introduced the first photo by saying, ‘Here’s where I look like my Jewish cousin!’ – it was a picture of her with a huge, distorted nose. No one laughed, and Jay nervously said, ‘I’m glad you said that and not me.’ When the show aired, they cut out her ‘Jewish’ comment and added a laugh track to the bit.”

Another guest in the audience told us, “If you watch the clip, you can see Halle saying the word ‘Jewish,’ though obviously there is no audio. NBC covered her a – -. Ms. Berry should know how unbelievably inappropriate her comment was . . . She should be ashamed of herself.”

Berry, 41, who sounded like she was near tears, told Page Six last night: “I so didn’t mean to offend anybody – and after the show I realized it could be seen as offensive, so I asked Jay to take it out, and he did.”

The gorgeous actress, who is 4 1/2 months pregnant with her first child, by boyfriend Gabriel Aubry, said, “What happened was I was backstage before the show and I have three girls who are Jewish who work for me. We were going through pictures to see which ones looked silly, and one of my Jewish friends said [of the big-nose picture], ‘That could be your Jewish cousin!’ And I guess it was fresh in my mind, and it just came out of my mouth. But I didn’t mean to offend anybody. I didn’t. I didn’t mean any harm.”

Berry, who even offered to call Page Six’s source and apologize in person, said, “It was just a lighthearted segment that was meant to make fun of myself. There was a picture where I said I looked like Monica Lewinsky and one where I said I looked like Jay. It was just supposed to be a silly segment. I am so sorry, and I apologize.”

[From Page Six]

That’s all pretty weak, but at least she owned up to it and apologized afterwards. Halle Berry just lost about 20 points in my estimation. If I didn’t have a strong opinion of her before, I do now. It doesn’t seem mean-spirited so much as just ignorant and stupid.

Thanks to user JonDonnis on Superior Pics for the full video download. We cut this version from that.