Jimmy Fallon is an enigma. A mostly charmless and unfunny enigma, but an enigma nonetheless. I don’t hate him, but I definitely don’t like him—he just occupies a weird, empty little space in popular culture.
But now, with Conan O’Brien moving on to take over The Tonight Show, Fallon has been handed the reins of Late Night, and his weird little space has gotten a whole lot bigger.
Fallon rose to fame as a cast member of Saturday Night Live, where he perpetually ruined the sketches he was in by mugging for the camera, unable to bear the weight of his own perceived funniness. Years later, he still isn’t funny, but it seems the writers on his show know how to deal with this. The first three days of broadcasts were marked not by huge success, but by profound indifference and occasional chuckles.
In other words, he’s a hell of a lot better than Carson Daly (and that asshole’s had a show for three years).
In standard late-night fashion, Fallon opens his show with a monologue consisting of topical jokes that mostly miss their marks. By the third show his timing improved, though not the jokes. He also took some time to breathe, which is good.
Most disconcerting about Fallon’s monologue is the weird way he looks at the audience. He sort of stares past you (at the teleprompter?) and it distinctly seems like he’s examining a very interesting painting that’s positioned over your left shoulder.
The skits, which take place after the opening but before the guests, have been abysmal—and are almost always based around bringing audience members down onto the stage. This is just awkward. The funniest sketch so far involved zooming around the audience with a camera, positioning faces in a Facebook profile, and then writing fake updates next to their face.
Another hilarious bit involved The Roots, who function as the show’s house band, and was called “Slow Jamming the News.” For this joke, which I hope becomes a recurring feature, Fallon and the band sing news stories in the style of Brian McKnight or R. Kelly. Because The Roots are experts at this sort of musical art form, the results are delicious.
And it should been mentioned that The Roots are now the best live band on late night. My advice: get ?uestlove to talk more, that guy is actually pretty damn funny, and could work really well as a straight man to Fallon’s king-idiot persona.
Far and way, the worst part of Fallon’s new iteration of Late Night is the interview segments, which take up the majority of the show. He can’t ask a question to save his life, and seems to stutter out statements in the vain hope that the guest will fill in the blanks. For someone like Tina Fey, that’s fine. She’s funny enough on her own. But with Robert De Niro, who was the first guest on the first night, Fallon’s inability as a host was excruciating.
He obviously understands what a funny late-night host should be, but, try as he might, he can’t pull it off.
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is neither all good nor all bad. The writing is OK, but the host is annoying and, much like Fallon himself, it occupies a weird little space on television. It’s a maddening form of entertainment.