Jimmy Fallon Was on Top of the World. Then Came Trump.
By
DAVE ITZKOFFMAY 17, 2017
Once the undisputed juggernaut of the late-night category, Mr. Fallon’s “Tonight Show,” a celebrity-friendly cavalcade of games and gags, has seen its ratings decline in recent months. Meanwhile, his politically pointed competitor Stephen Colbert, who hosts CBS’s “The Late Show,” has closed what was once a formidable gap of nearly one million viewers.
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Mr. Fallon, a former “Saturday Night Live” star, says his favorite segments are dispensable morsels of “brain candy — when people go, ‘That’s cool that they put this much thought into such a dumb, silly bit.’”
CreditBryan Derballa for The New York Times
The resurgent interest in left-leaning programming hasn’t helped Mr. Fallon, a former star of “Saturday Night Live” who has built his brand on his all-around entertainer’s skills and down-the-middle tastes. And as Mr. Fallon is well aware, viewers haven’t seen him in quite the same light since
an interview he conducted with Mr. Trump in September, which was widely criticized for its fawning, forgiving tone. In a gesture that has come to haunt the host, he concluded the segment by
playfully running his fingers through Mr. Trump’s hair.
Video by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
Mr. Fallon acknowledges now that the Trump interview was a setback, if not quite a mistake, and he has absorbed at least a portion of the anger that was directed at him by critics and online detractors.
“They have a right to be mad,” a chastened Mr. Fallon said in an interview this month. “If I let anyone down, it hurt my feelings that they didn’t like it. I got it.”
But if these events prompted Mr. Fallon to search his own soul, he said they did not compel him to make widespread changes at “The Tonight Show.”
The program is still profitable and strongly supported by advertisers, so if Mr. Fallon faces any crisis, it’s an existential one: What if the broader shift to a more partisan, more openly anti-Trump late-night isn’t temporary? If it has a longer life and a bigger impact than anyone foresees, what does he want his show to be?
As strongly as ever, Mr. Fallon believes it should be a place for a wide swath of viewers to get their entertainment and laughs, and that this philosophy will steer it through a period of intense polarization.
“I didn’t do it to humanize him. I almost did it to minimize him. I didn’t think that would be a compliment.”
JIMMY FALLON
“I don’t want to be bullied into not being me, and not doing what I think is funny,” he said more defiantly. “Just because some people bash me on Twitter, it’s not going to change my humor or my show.”
He added: “It’s not ‘The Jimmy Fallon Show.’ It’s ‘The Tonight Show.’”
Late one evening, Mr. Fallon was in his sixth-floor corner office at NBC’s Rockefeller Center headquarters. The room was lit by the neon of the Radio City Music Hall sign while he played a party game on his PlayStation 4 with several of his writers.
In an editing suite, finishing touches were being made to a segment in which Mr. Fallon, Kevin Bacon and the country singer Chris Stapleton
impersonated the Texas rock band ZZ Top. Before the taping, a guitar that was supposed to spin around Mr. Stapleton’s waist had broken, and Mr. Fallon was hoping there was footage from their dress rehearsal to cover this up.
This is the kind of crisis that Mr. Fallon likes to deal with. He gets a similar thrill from the daily creative meetings in his office, where writers share their progress on projects like a video in which the Smash Mouth song “All Star” is
recreated with dialogue from “Star Wars” movies.
The segments he loves best, Mr. Fallon said, are dispensable morsels of “brain candy — when people go, ‘That’s cool that they put this much thought into such a dumb, silly bit.’”
Lip Sync Battle with Shaquille O'Neal and Pitbull Video by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
There was a time when Mr. Fallon’s
lip-sync battles and
facetious thank-you notes gave “The Tonight Show” dominance. At the end of 2016, it was handily winning its 11:35 p.m. time slot with around 3.5 million viewers a night.
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Mr. Fallon, 42, arriving to work at 30 Rock. CreditBryan Derballa for The New York Times
Not five months later, Mr. Colbert usually surpasses Mr. Fallon in overall nightly audience; in a recent week, Mr. Colbert drew more than three million viewers, while Mr. Fallon had just under 2.7 million. “The Tonight Show” has continued to win the coveted 18-to-49 demographic that is specially valued by advertisers.
Mr. Fallon claims he pays no attention to these metrics. “We’re winning in something,” he said. “People in the height requirement between 5-7 and 5-11, we’re No. 1, from 11:50 to 11:55.” More emphatically, he added: “I never, ever care. I’ll know when someone fires me.”
Even so, in recent weeks, as Mr. Colbert has drawn headlines for
a lewd joke about Mr. Trump and the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin; and Jimmy Kimmel, the host of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” has touched off a political debate by
sharing the story of his newborn son’s heart surgery, there is a sense that Mr. Fallon cannot command the zeitgeist as easily as he used to.
During long taping breaks at “The Tonight Show,” Mr. Fallon likes to regale his studio audience with tales of his childhood: growing up in Saugerties, N.Y., where his dad used a key to scratch out the swear words on his Rodney Dangerfield albums, and the impression competition he won as a teenager at a club in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Off camera, he has a more cutting, fatalistic sense of humor than he displays on TV. When I asked him about the recent maelstrom of criticism that Mr. Colbert faced, Mr. Fallon quipped: “I shouldn’t have started
the hashtag #FireColbert. Looking back on it, I went too far.”
But as much as any other virtue or quality he possesses, what has lately come to define Mr. Fallon is his interview with Mr. Trump from Sept. 15.
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Mr. Fallon, who loves playing video games, showing off the contents in his briefcase.CreditBryan Derballa for The New York Times
That day had been a particularly contentious one for Mr. Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee:
In a Washington Post interview, he refused to say that President Obama was born in the United States, and his son Donald Jr. was being criticized
for saying “they’d be warming up the gas chamber” if Republicans behaved as Democrats did.
Mr. Fallon’s questions, however, were mostly innocuous; he asked Mr. Trump why children should want to grow up to be president and if his business background had helped him in the campaign. Their conversation concluded with Mr. Fallon fulfilling his longstanding wish of ruffling Mr. Trump’s hair.
“I didn’t do it to humanize him,” Mr. Fallon said, explaining this moment to me. “I almost did it to minimize him. I didn’t think that would be a compliment: ‘He did the thing that we all wanted to do.’”
Once the interview was broadcast, Mr. Fallon said, “It all started going crazy.” A barrage of negative social media posts gave way to damning appraisals
in publications like Variety, where the critic Sonia Saraiya asked: “Who wouldn’t Fallon interview with such fawning, giggly acceptance? Where would he draw the line?”
She added, “How long will it take before American audiences lose all their faith in him, as an honest person they can watch every night?”
Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live” and executive producer of “The Tonight Show,” said that at the time of Mr. Trump’s “Tonight Show” visit, he was regarded incorrectly as a presidential also-ran.
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In his office, Mr. Fallon laughed with a few of his writers, from left, Katie Hockmeyer, Gerard Bradford and Jonathan Adler, during their daily creative meeting. CreditBryan Derballa for The New York Times
“I don’t think anybody was focused on him winning, or that possibility,” Mr. Michaels said. “It had been absolute, bedrock certainty that Hillary Clinton was winning that election. There was no doubt, certainly in the news department in our building.”
Accusations that Mr. Fallon was helping to normalize an extremist candidate spread rapidly, just as they had when Mr. Michaels invited Mr. Trump
to host “Saturday Night Live” in 2015.
“You’re assuming that people can’t make up their own minds,” Mr. Michaels said. “The moment they see someone, they go, ‘Oh, they had him on there, then they must love him.’ You couldn’t do that show if you only had people you liked.”
For Mr. Fallon, who lives a portion of every day online, the hate felt inescapable.
“I go, I just can’t read Twitter,” he said. “Then I can’t read the news. I can’t read the internet.”
Speaking in a quiet, tentative tone, Mr. Fallon seemed to be reliving the experience as he recounted it.
“I’m a people pleaser,” he said. “If there’s one bad thing on Twitter about me, it will make me upset. So, after this happened, I was devastated. I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just trying to have fun.”
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Mr. Fallon contemplating the idea of a mustache for the summer. CreditBryan Derballa for The New York Times
But when the backlash did not subside, even after a few days, Mr. Fallon never addressed the controversy on air. “I didn’t talk about it, and I should have talked about it,” he said. “I regret that.”
One event after another seemed to intervene in Mr. Fallon’s life, crowding out the fury over the Trump interview but not quelling it.
In October, The New York Post published
an article that claimed NBC was concerned with Mr. Fallon’s drinking, a charge he categorically denies.
“I could never do a day-to-day job if I was drinking every night,” he said. “That’s just kicking you when you’re down.”
Mr. Fallon hosted the Golden Globes in January; helped open his “Race Through New York” ride at the Universal Orlando resort in Florida and moved “The Tonight Show” there for a week in April; then
hosted “S.N.L.” two weeks later.
His colleagues believed that keeping busy was the best thing Mr. Fallon could do in this period. “He’s happiest when there’s a lot of work and big shows to do,” said Mike DiCenzo, a producer and a showrunner of “The Tonight Show.” “That’s when he really rises.”
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“Johnny was an instant success, but a lot of the critics thought, this is not culturally relevant,” said Jay Leno, the longtime “Tonight Show” host who handed off to Mr. Fallon. “Jack Paar would spend 90 minutes with Noël Coward, and
Johnny did Art Fern. The stories would say, ‘When is “The Tonight Show” going stop the silliness and get back to substantive issues?’”
Mr. Fallon is “probably closer to what Johnny was like than anybody in a long time,” Mr. Leno said. “Johnny had a youthful look about him and could play musical instruments and do magic tricks. It was all about mass appeal.”
Friends who have known Mr. Fallon since his time at “S.N.L.,” where he was a cast member from 1998 to 2004, say he has a likability that is more durable that any fleeting cultural shift. At heart, as onscreen, they say, he is that wisenheimer with an arsenal of impressions who
cracked up at his own sketches and “Weekend Update” one-liners.
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Jimmy Fallon during a rehearsal at Studio 6B. CreditBryan Derballa for The New York Times
“He had this ability to make famous people feel comfortable and go outside their comfort zone,” said Seth Meyers, the “S.N.L.” alumnus who succeeded Mr. Fallon as host of NBC’s “Late Night.”
Steve Burke, the chief executive of NBCUniversal, said he spoke with Mr. Fallon in the weeks after the Trump interview uproar and encouraged the host to keep moving forward. He said he was not concerned with any ratings declines at Mr. Fallon’s show.
“That red-hot performance was almost certain to end at some point,” Mr. Burke said, “but he’s still head and shoulders above his competition, creatively.”
Though the program has seen turnover in top creative posts — the showrunner Josh Lieb left in the fall; the head writer A. D. Miles exited this spring — Mr. Fallon said these were “growing pains.”
“I don’t want to have the same exact people here,” he said. “I don’t want it to get stale.”
Both Mr. Burke and Robert Greenblatt, the NBC Entertainment chairman, said that there had been no directive from them or the company for changes at “The Tonight Show” and that Mr. Fallon has wide latitude to make the program he wants.
“I don’t want to be bullied into not being me, and not doing what I think is funny.”
JIMMY FALLON
“We tell him what we think, but we don’t tell him what to do,” Mr. Burke said.
He added: “If the world gets a little snarkier, I don’t think the answer is for Jimmy to get snarkier. I think the answer is for Jimmy to be Jimmy.”
Mr. Fallon recognizes that the cultural space he operates in has changed in recent months — “The world did,” he said. “Everything did” — but how his show evolves to reflect that is something he’s figuring out on his feet.
“Of course the show has to change,” he said. “It’s a different environment. I don’t know what bits we’re going to do, but we’re trying everything.”
There’s an enduring expectation that Mr. Fallon’s political comedy will never be as incisive as his competitors’. Reviewing their reactions to the same supply of Trump news on a given night in February,
James Poniewozik wrote in The Times, “Mr. Colbert brought a carving knife, and Mr. Fallon brought a butter knife.”
Though Mr. Fallon is not averse to joking about Mr. Trump on his program or impersonating him
in comedy sketches that
portray the president as a squinting narcissist, he does not want this type of humor consuming “The Tonight Show.”
“There’s only so many bits you can do,” he said. “I’m happy that only 50 percent of my monologue is about Trump.”
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Mr. Fallon in rehearsal. CreditBryan Derballa for The New York Times
Mr. Leno, who was both praised and criticized for his evenhanded approach to political comedy, said that kind of centrism was almost impossible today.
“We live in an era now where if you don’t take sides, both sides hate you,” Mr. Leno said.
During the 1990s and 2000s, Mr. Leno said, the stakes seemed somehow lower, the presidential caricatures more harmless. “Bush was dumb, and Clinton was horny,” he said. “When I was doing a monologue, I never questioned anybody’s patriotism — you questioned their judgment.”
As much as the current administration seems to serve up easy laughs on a plate, Mr. Leno wondered whether contemporary late-night hosts were overindulging in this type of comedy.
“I am not a Trump fan at all, not in the slightest, not in the least,” he said. “But this constant pounding does have a tendency to anesthetize your feelings.”
To look across the current late-night spectrum, Mr. Leno said, “It should be called, ‘What Did Trump Do Now?’ That’s basically what everybody’s monologue is. You almost wish for a normal day, just to have a joke.”
Mr. Meyers acknowledged that
the increasingly political bent of his “Late Night” program had probably alienated some viewers, and said that Mr. Fallon’s efforts to create a more varied and inclusive program were not only still viable but more likely to prevail in the long run.
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Mr. Fallon getting a touch of makeup. CreditBryan Derballa for The New York Times
“I do think there’s some nobility in trying to do a show for more people, as opposed to doing a show for less,” Mr. Meyers said.
He added, “After the hot takes are dead and gone, and the carcasses are strewn about, having fun is pretty undefeated as a way to spend your time.”
Tina Fey, who was Mr. Fallon’s co-anchor on “Weekend Update,” said that a sharp partisan turn was simply not in his character.
“Jimmy is not a political comedian, so it would be very phony of him to go out and do long political joke rants just because that’s what some people want,” Ms. Fey said in an email. “‘The Tonight Show’ has historically been a friendly, light show.”
“No one would have thought, even two years ago, that we’d be in a climate where the Republican candidate for president would be too divisive a figure to have on ‘The Tonight Show,’” she continued. “But here we are. Did the show figure that out a beat later than the rest of the world? Maybe. But I don’t think the blame lies with ‘The Tonight Show.’ The blame lies with the hateful rhetoric of the candidate.”
Mr. Michaels observed that Mr. Colbert’s political voice was first coined on cable TV rather than a broadcast network, adding that “it was not surprising that Colbert came into his own when he began to attack Trump.”
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Mr. Fallon taking the stage at NBC’s Studio 6B. CreditBryan Derballa for The New York Times
But, going back to the Carson era, Mr. Michaels said it was not unusual for audiences to drift away from “The Tonight Show” and then return to it.
“There were lots of times when it seemed stale or not as much fun,” he said. “And then you stopped watching for a little while. Then something happened, and you watched it and you loved it.”
Back in his office, Mr. Fallon had returned from vigorously high-fiving his editor for adding a successfully executed guitar spin into the ZZ Top video, and was celebrating with a lukewarm can of Budweiser.
He explained that there was something about the fleeting nature of late-night comedy — a segment is just a few minutes long, and if doesn’t make you laugh, another one is right around the corner — that suited him even better than “Saturday Night Live.”
When he was on “S.N.L.”, Mr. Fallon said, he had too much downtime to fixate on his mistakes and second-guess himself.
“I would kick myself Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, until I did the next show,” he said. “That’s too long to think about how you messed up and could have been funnier.”
If he starts to feel insecure about a given episode of “The Tonight Show,” he said, “I’ve got another show tomorrow. I can’t even worry about tonight’s anymore. I’ve already spent too much time.”
Whatever anyone thinks of his incarnation of “The Tonight Show,” Mr. Fallon said no one could deny the sheer energy he puts into it.
“I don’t half-ass it,” he said. “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right. There will be a day when we can allow ourselves to be tired. I don’t know when it is, but it can’t be now.”
