  I comment on a recent paper by Ruiz and Tsallis [Phys. Lett. A 376, 2451
(2012)] claiming to have found a '$q$-exponential' generalization of the large
deviation principle for strongly correlated random variables. I show that the
basic scaling results that they find numerically can be reproduced with a
simple example involving independent random variables, and are not specifically
related to the $q$-exponential function. In fact, identical scaling results can
be obtained with any other power-law deformations of the exponential. Thus
their results do not conclusively support their claim of a $q$-exponential
generalization of the large deviation principle.
