Fallon sees ‘Tonight Show’ as a laboratory for fun
On a recent afternoon, Jimmy Fallon sat in the dark, whispering seductively into a microphone.
“You may run a city, but what makes you think you can measure up to the president? Aren’t you worried about … performance anxiety?” he said, giggling as the camera shifted to focus on Democratic presidential contender and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who was perched on a stool 10 feet behind him.
In Studio 6B at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, home of “The Tonight Show,” Fallon was rehearsing one of his signature bits, “Slow Jam the News,” where politicians and other newsmakers provide sober commentary on the headlines while the host makes PG-13 puns in a velvety Barry White purr as his house band, the Roots, pumps out a sultry R&B rhythm.
Buttigieg sailed through his session on the first try. After rehearsal, Fallon shook hands with the 37year-old candidate and shared an amusing anecdote about another youthful politician, Barack Obama, who slow-jammed the news twice — first as a newly inaugurated president afraid of seeming less than serious, and later near the end of his second term in office when he was maybe too eager to cut loose.
“You’ve had eight years of a pretty flawless presidency,” he recalled telling Obama. “Don’t ruin it now.”
Hamming it up with a leading presidential contender is just one item on a typically busy agenda for Fallon, who started his day with a sketch at NBCUniversal’s upfront presentation for advertisers at Radio City Music Hall, then dashed upstairs for meetings and rehearsals before taping at 5 p.m. The audience squealed with delight during Buttigieg and Fallon’s performance, a bit that captures the spirit that has defined “The Tonight Show” since Fallon took over five years ago.
While Fallon’s latenight neighbors have grown increasingly political, he has stayed true to his show’s party vibe, balancing gentle topical humor with deft musical parodies, playful celebrity antics and genial interviews.
“We really want this to be a show everyone can watch,” he says.
That may be difficult as the country heads into what is bound to be another contentious election season. But the former anchor of “SNL’s” “Weekend Update” is excited to get to know the new presidential hopefuls and their various quirks.
“We’re excited because it’s something different, instead of telling the same Trump joke every day,” he says, noting that “Tonight” will air live the week of the first Democratic debate later this month.
The live shows are just one example of how Fallon has “bent the rules a little bit” as he’s grown more comfortable on the job. The goal of this experimentation is to “see how far we can stretch ‘The Tonight Show’ and see what we end up with,” he says. “In another year, it might be all animated. I might be a robot.”
Stephen Colbert’s politically barbed “Late Show” now comfortably beats “The Tonight Show” in overall viewers, but the two programs run neckand-neck in the 18-to-49 demographic.
“I just never cared about ratings, ever,” Fallon says. “If you said to kids, ‘Did you hear that Jimmy Fallon’s gone down in the Nielsen ratings?’ they’d go, ‘What?’ ” He points to “Tonight’s” popularity on YouTube, where it has 21 million subscribers (more than three times as many as “The Late Show”).
Music remains vital to “Tonight’s” appeal, and Fallon gets visibly excited talking about it. This past year, he crossed a major item off his “Tonight Show” bucket list when Bob Dylan appeared on the show. And he says he’d love to write “an actual song” and put it out in the world — perhaps a bubbly summer single or a cut for an animated movie.
“Why not?” he says. “It’s like a laboratory for every idea we can try. It’s pretty awesome.”