He asked for the factual premises of monologue jokes if he didn’t know the headlines that inspired them, and he confidently waved off suggestions that didn’t fit his freewheeling vision for the program. “And I’m not kidding, one leg is behind his head.”)įallon is not just his own in-house cheerleader - he is also the lens through which all “Tonight Show” material passes and the final arbiter of what ideas the program uses. (“He’s wearing short, short, short shorts, sitting on a sequined sea horse,” Fallon recalled. While he reviewed plans for that evening’s show and heard pitches for future segments, Fallon also riffed on inside jokes with his colleagues and spun stories from his showbiz career, like the time he ran into Richard Simmons, the excitable fitness guru, at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The energy in the virtual room picked up when Fallon joined around noon he was wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt and his once orderly coif was drifting noticeably into shagginess. “I’m ready to see other humans in my life.” “I’m so ready for people,” said Jeremy Bronson, a producer. While his viewers are living through tumultuous, unpredictable times, his answer has been to offer them gentle comedic comfort alongside his wife and their two young daughters.įallon, who is 45, had hoped that presenting this stripped-down show in the company of his family would let people see him as a thoughtful, compassionate person rather than an overeager caricature. Since mid-March, when production of “The Tonight Show” was shut down at NBC’s Rockefeller Plaza headquarters, Fallon has been hosting a homemade version of the program from his 2.2 acre spread in the Hamptons. If the coronavirus era has forced the late-night programs to take a back-to-basics approach and rediscover their core values, then Fallon, through equal parts intent, accident and necessity, has been steering “The Tonight Show” in a more personal, intimate direction. “I’m clearly a late-night talk-show host. “What is the change? How do I change? How do I do it? What do I do?”īut first, he said, he had to deal with the errors and the inhibitions that had been keeping him quiet. “We can’t say, ‘Be the change,’ and just sit around tweeting, ‘Be the change, be the change,’” he said. He also said he had been scrutinizing himself, trying to understand what he could do better and how he could use his voice to help break the cycle of anger, sadness and fear.Īs Fallon observed in his remarks, simply wishing for things to get better would not be good enough. But Fallon broadly acknowledged the days of civil unrest still transpiring and the “senseless violence that erupts and disrupts the entire country and now the world.” He did not specifically mention the death of George Floyd - that would come later in the program, in conversations with Derrick Johnson, the president and chief executive of the N.A.A.C.P., the CNN anchor Don Lemon and the anti-racism educator Jane Elliott. In a sometimes quavering voice, Fallon said he was sorry for wearing blackface in an old “Saturday Night Live” sketch that had recently been recirculating online. Though nothing has been normal lately, he told his audience, “I’m not going to have a normal show tonight.” The atmosphere was palpably tense for this typically lighthearted late-night comedy program Fallon was wearing a sweater and clasping his hands together as he looked into the camera lens of an iPhone held by his wife, Nancy Juvonen. On the evening of June 1, Jimmy Fallon sat behind a well-worn table in a corner of the Sagaponack, N.Y., farmhouse that has become the substitute studio of “The Tonight Show.”
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