Jimmy Fallon extended his current deal with NBC and will continue to host the iconic late night show franchise, The Tonight Show, through (at least) 2028.
Which, if nothing else, gives me a good excuse to air out some of my recent thoughts about Fallon.
While I’m a huge fan of comedy, I haven’t watched “late night shows” in any kind of a consistent way in decades. But then I take a step back and I realize that I’m “consuming” an awful lot of late night (or late night-ish) “content” in all kinds of ways, and I’m sure many other people are doing the same these days.
For example, I try to catch Jon Stewart’s current Monday night Daily Show via YouTube “the day after,” and I’ll typically catch up on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight at some point or another.
But getting back to YouTube, I enjoy falling into what I like to call “YouTube rabbit holes” now and again. Now, I’m not talking about content related to indoctrinating me into a militia or some such – my rabbit holes are about comedy, thank you very much, and they tend to either be focused on old Saturday Night Live sketches or something percolating about the webs from the likes of Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’Brien, and our guy Jimmy Fallon.
I’m particularly enamored of Fallon’s musical comedy abilities, wild concepts, and offbeat sensibilities. My all time favorite along these lines is his scary good transformation into Jim Morrison, fronting “The Doors” on an Ed Sullivan Show-like set to rip through a bizzarro hilarious take on the Reading Rainbow theme song.
I’m also obsessed with Fallon’s other kinds of forays into this kind of territory, especially his transformation into Bob Dylan to cover (of all things!) the Charles in Charge theme song.
I also greatly enjoyed the sadly short-lived podcast, Strike Force Five, which featured Fallon along with four other supremely talented late night hosts: John Oliver of Last Week Tonight, Seth Myers of Late Night, Jimmy Kimmel of Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Stephen Colbert of The Late Show.
The idea, spearheaded by Kimmel, was to produce a podcast during the recent writer’s strike to help support the staff members and families of those shows. And it gave all of us the rare opportunity to hear that specific group joke around and dish about their incredibly unique lives in the entertainment business.
I enjoyed every episode of Strike Force Five – including some incredible guest appearances that ranged from late night show host legend David Letterman to Ryan Reynolds (who generously supported the podcast by way of the seemingly umpteen companies he owns these days, including Mint Mobile and Aviation American Gin).
Fallon was his goofy and affable as ever self on the podcast, though I’ll admit that I was mostly distracted whenever he spoke as the podcast episodes were released in the wake of a Rolling Stone article that assessed he is not a great boss (and perhaps even a pretty bad one) to many of his Tonight Show staffers.
A final quasi-random aside that you might be interested in if you’ve hung in this far: one of my best friends and I recently realized that we agree on almost everything, but that we deeply enjoy getting into semi-heated and often hilarious debates about things where we disagree on the margins.
One perfect example: I assessed one day that Jimmy Fallon is “super talented” whereas my friend said no hold it right there, and instead countered that he is “merely talented.”
I’ll let you be the final judge on that one.