Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show announcer: “He’s better than Carson"

[TMC]

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertain...icle-1.2535321

"The sketches are better than Carson's. He’s perfect for it,” says Steve Higgins, who also dismisses rumors that Fallon is a party boy in real life.

[TMC]

http://www.dailydot.com/upstream/ame...allon-fatigue/

We’re a month into Donald Trump’s presidency, and Jimmy Fallon already looks exhausted.

While many of his colleagues in late-night TV attempted to make sense of the Feb. 16 press conference that transpired on television mere hours before their shows were set to tape, the Tonight Show host took a different approach. Fallon transformed himself into Trump with a styled blond wig, copious amounts of makeup to match the president’s hue, and the hand gestures to embody the persona. A frequent character in his bag of comedic charades during the 2016 election, Fallon’s Trump appeared in front of gold curtains and responded to nearly every question as “fake news.”

Add in a tiny hand holding a glass of water for Fallon’s Trump to sip, and a Magic 8-Ball that revealed his answers, and you’ve got the entire essence of the tedious sketch.

Fallon’s off night came as, for the first time since Stephen Colbert made his debut on The Late Show in September 2015, the undisputed king of late-night TV lost his ratings lead.

Colbert’s streak began the week he had Jon Stewart read fake executive orders from the president. For three weeks straight Colbert has beaten Fallon in viewers overall. However, Fallon still has a strong lead in the 18-49 demo (the main one advertisers care about). It’s too early to say if it’s more of a blip or if it’s leading to something more concrete—and it’ll matter more during the Upfronts in May—but for the first time in ages late-night TV has become competitive.

The days of Leno and Letterman harboring personal beef are long gone. Nowadays hosts cheerfully appear on each others’ shows and refrain from publicly criticizing one another. And unlike previous late-night wars—both of a ratings and personal nature—there’s a digital front on top of what we see on TV. On YouTube, Fallon’s reign has been just as dominant.

But Colbert is suddenly doing better than Fallon, and there’s no surprise as to why. It’s Trump, and what’s being called the Trump Bump has allowed Colbert to find his groove while Fallon struggles. For Fallon detractors, it’s schadenfreude.

A lot of the online vitriol regarding Fallon stems from his role in his now-infamous and contentious interview with Trump. It came just 10 days before the first presidential debate, that fit of Fallon ruffling Trump’s hair like a toddler on grandpa’s lap.

The puff moment fell flat, and more than five months after the interview Fallon is still on the receiving end of backlash. Whether it’s his lukewarm turn at the Golden Globes, quips about him potentially hosting the White House correspondents’ dinner because he’d be safe, or his slip in the ratings, Fallon has run into a pitchfork mob of indignant liberals.

After all, at least one person was swayed enough by Fallon’s interview to vote for Trump. And Twitter is apt to remind him about it at every turn.

But is it the defining factor in the ratings swing? Or is it just a small blip in a landscape learning to adapt to such a radically different White House? And where does Fallon—a non-political host who garnered hatred because he didn’t challenge a guest—fit into all this?

Here’s Jimmy!
Fallon’s debut on The Tonight Show in 2014 after Jay Leno stepped down arrived with fanfare. Fallon had been refreshing on Late Night, youthful and ripe with trending music. It was a popular alternative to Craig Ferguson’s acquired taste.

When he first stepped onto that stage, it felt like he was trying to capture some of the magic of legendary Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. His show included “starring” in the title like Carson’s rendition of The Tonight Show, whereas others used “with”; the sketches recalled some of Carson’s bits; and Fallon even brought the show back to its original home in New York City. But Fallon was looking forward.

His staff tapped into social media, and while he certainly wasn’t the first late-night host to do it—Jimmy Kimmel’s YouTube channel started posting videos years before Fallon’s did—he became the best at it. Anything he did on the show got a second life online, and it wasn’t long before Fallon trumped Kimmel on YouTube.

Early reviews were mostly positive as TV writers cited Fallon’s manner and likability among the show's strengths. Even as one of the show’s early critics, the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum, called him “the nation’s most promising nephew.”

“What gives the show its reputation for warmth is the viral elements, those joyful dance contests and lip-synch showdowns, in which Fallon is at his best, laid-back and generous,” she wrote in 2014. “There’s something undeniably ingratiating, too, about the way he has spliced two strains of nostalgia: fondness for sixties talk shows and memories of dumb nineties pop culture (a recent skit featured four separate, logarithmically unfunny references to Sour Patch Kids). But as a host? The man’s a lox.”

Throughout the Obama years, Fallon’s schtick stayed true to what worked. Its most popular sketch spawned a spinoff series. When Colbert stepped into his broadcast territory, Fallon cemented his spot at the top: Just one day after Colbert’s debut, Fallon delivered a double whammy of viral goodness. Until this month, that streak stuck.

The hair ruffle heard 'round the world
Popular and seemingly untouchable, Fallon settled into his show. He wasn’t a political host, but he didn’t need to go there. A few years later, he can no longer afford that luxury.

Like many of his bits, Fallon ruffling Trump’s hair was a lowest-common denominator moment; you figure that Fallon would’ve done it to any other guest he had on. The audience loved it, but at home it played out much differently depending on how you felt about the man who would soon become president. (Reddit’s main Trump hub loved the moment, as well as the subsequent interview.)

Backlash to Fallon arrived swiftly. Viewers and journalists accused Fallon of humanizing Trump and his rhetoric with a viral moment intended to be light; he was further lambasted for not challenging Trump on his policies or any of his lies. Samantha Bee called out Fallon and NBC for their roles during an episode of Full Frontal.

“If he thinks that a race-baiting demagogue is OK, that gives permission to millions of Americans to also think that,” she said.

On the other hand Seth Meyers and Colbert both stood up for him, and Meyers later called for people to blame him for Trump winning instead; Meyers pointed to his role at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner as proof.

“I mean, have you seen my show?” Fallon responded when asked about the interview a few days later. “I’m never too hard on anyone.”

Comedian Billy Eichner was kind toward Fallon in the months after the interview, although he called the moment “naïve and a bit of a slap in the face,” and said that Fallon probably didn’t think any of it through by treating Trump like everyone else in that moment—and might not have been aware of how it looked to other people.

“I hope that he’ll be more mindful of that because Jimmy does have a big platform,” Eichner told Vulture in January. “He gets double the ratings of the other guys. He is probably speaking to more Trump voters than you or I. And I do think there’s a responsibility to not take things lightly.”

Late-night TV's political roots
Some have argued that Fallon shouldn’t be held to the same standards as his professional colleagues—many alums of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show—because he's not a politics guy. (He even admitted in Live From New York, an oral history of Saturday Night Live, that he didn’t really follow the news before being asked to host “Weekend Update.”)

Unfortunately for Fallon, his job is historically political.

In the wake of Michael Flynn’s resignation as national security adviser, many—including one of the reporters responsible for breaking the stories on Watergate—began to draw political parallels to modern times. While Americans in the early ’70s didn’t have the kind of instant access to news that papers, digital media, and cable offer, it was from an unlikely source where many learned about the scandal that brought down President Nixon: late-night TV.

Dick Cavett, host of ABC’s The Dick Cavett Show from 1968 to 1974, covered Watergate in depth as it happened more often than anyone but nightly newscasts. He chatted with the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, G. Gordon Liddy, and most of the major players in Watergate, often with a simple approach: Let the interview subject talk. (Given the number of lies that Trump and his administration have said since he took office, this approach is no longer wise.)

The point is Cavett didn’t assume that his audience followed the story like he did, so he would catch his viewers up. With some humor, of course.

His attention to Watergate, as shown in the 2014 documentary Dick Cavett’s Watergate, would pay off. He caught the ire of Nixon’s White House—not for the first time, as the Nixon tapes would eventually reveal—and was invited to film a special episode from the Senate hearing room where government investigations took place. This wouldn’t feel too out of place to late-night hosts taking their shows to the RNC and DNC, or out on the road to get the story. While Fallon has been compared to Carson, it’s Meyers who has been compared to Cavett.

Cavett didn’t have the ratings of his late-night rival and friend Carson, but according to Dick Cavett’s Watergate director John Scheinfeld, Cavett ultimately had the respect and the watercooler chatter the next day from him. Cavett also argued that Carson, who was more of an entertainer, was capable of doing Watergate-related segments too.

Let’s remember that Fallon has made plenty of jokes at the expense of the presidency, no matter who’s in office. Fallon apologists note that he doesn’t need politics to succeed, and he was fine pre-Trump.

Now he’s trying and has looked out of his comfort zone, which might be worse. Especially because Carson, when push came to shove, could get political with the best of them.

“Mr. Carson alone presides over our consciousness,” the New York Times wrote in 1975. “When he began making Watergate jokes we knew it was permissible to ridicule the President that Mr. Nixon was done for.”

Trump was made for Meyers and Colbert
Fallon’s Trump shortcomings don’t occur in a bubble. His competition is frankly passing him by, when it comes to political humor.

This time last year, Meyers was already coming into his own in his interviews and smart analysis, but was far behind his fellow late-night hosts on YouTube and Facebook. He passed 1 million subscribers on Feb. 15, and millions watch his “A Closer Look” segments online daily.

Colbert had a rocky start at The Late Show and suffered a shakeup after getting a new showrunner; rumors swirled that James Corden could replace him. But he’s turned it around (and even humanized himself). He embraced aspects of The Colbert Report, stopped trying to hit the middle ground, and came out swinging. For both of them, daily Trump takes are firmly in their comedic arsenal.

Fallon still has the most subscribers out of any of them, and many of his videos easily reach 1 million views. But it’s been ages since Fallon had a truly viral moment, besides the ruffle. His most popular video in the past year is his “Lip Sync Battle” with Melissa McCarthy, one of his older segments that viewers can get plenty of away from his channel.

As Colbert becomes a worthy ratings adversary, Fallon still has the edge online. But just barely.

When looking at videos online by both channels from Jan. 30-Feb. 3, the first week that Colbert beat Fallon, it’s close. When calculated, Fallon had 32.8 million total views to Colbert’s 32.6 million. According to Social Blade, a site that measures growth across social media channels, The Late Show’s channel gets more daily views, although The Tonight Show still has it beat in most other areas.

Of course, the ratings bump might not last. When asked by the New York Times in a pre-Oscars Q&A, Kimmel, who directly competes with Fallon and Colbert, said Fallon would return to the top. (For one, Fallon’s lead-in series, The Voice, will soon return to TV.) If nothing else, the ratings tug might be enough to get Fallon’s creativity flowing to reinvent the game he dominated for so long.

Maybe then, he’ll start to win his audience back.

[TMC]

Originally Posted by TMC

http://www.dailydot.com/upstream/ame...allon-fatigue/

The fundamental problems I think with Jimmy Fallon are:
1) He's a lousy interviewer. He's relentlessly brown-nosing, overly enthusiastic to the point of phoniness, and doesn't allow his guests a time to breath so much to speak.

2) Fallon's frat-boy, goofball, juvenile "happy-good time shtick" quickly wears thin after a while. There's little depth or proverbial edge in his comedy to make up for it. Fallon is reasonably good at impressions, but he doesn't put enough of a unique spin on it outside of simply mimicking his subjects to the simplest degree.

[Mario500]

TMC, could you rename this topic "Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show announcer: 'He’s better than [Johnny] Carson' "?

[Svenfan1234]

He is not better than Carson anyway. Nobody can top JC.

[Edison]

"May a crazed lizard unravel your underwear, Higgins."

[Mario500]

Edison, what was the purpose of your posting the message and image above this sentence?

[Edison]

Oh, just that I agree with Ron Burgundy.

[Retro4Life]

The issue with all of today's late night hosts is that they make the interviews all about themselves. Constantly mugging for the camera, making a joke out of EVERY SINGLE thing the guest says, and NEVER listening. Johnny was the master at knowing when to talk, ask questions, make a joke, and also, when to shut up.

He was truly curious about the world around him, thus his booking biologists, astronomists, authors, etc. All you ever get now are the "hot" people, who have some new thing to promote. This isn't totally the fault of the hosts, of course; I'm sure someone else does the booking.

But..."better than Johnny..."?

[JJM]

That announcer must be smoking some strong weed! Carson was the greatest, no one from today can come close!

[robyrob]

definitely not better than Carson.

Fallon has his followers and viewers, he's big with younger viewers and those with short attention spans; but he's a terrible interviewer, his bits are thin and repetitive and he's just a one-trick pony.

Carson really was a great interviewer, had the best spectrum of guests and always brought out the best in them, he had a amazingly quick-witted mind and was consistently funny on multiple levels.

[TMC]

Originally Posted by robyrob

definitely not better than Carson.

Fallon has his followers and viewers, he's big with younger viewers and those with short attention spans; but he's a terrible interviewer, his bits are thin and repetitive and he's just a one-trick pony.

Carson really was a great interviewer, had the best spectrum of guests and always brought out the best in them, he had a amazingly quick-witted mind and was consistently funny on multiple levels.

http://www.pajiba.com/celebrities_ar...ing-status.php

It’s official. Variety has reported that Jimmy Fallon has been dethroned as King of late night by Stephen Colbert. While Fallon remains strongest with the key 18-49 demographic, Colbert’s Late Show has stormed ahead in overall numbers, something that seemed impossible only a year ago when Colbert was the subject of gossip over being replaced by fellow network host James Corden. We’ve written before about the hair ruffling route of Fallon’s downfall, and the recent New York Times profile that may have been intended as a sympathy tour but fell flat. The chances are that Fallon will be okay for the time being. The kids still like him, Lorne Michaels has his back, and NBC can rely on Seth Meyers for their late-night satire quota.

What hasn’t been covered is another late-night race Fallon has begun to stumble in, partly because it’s not really a late-night matter. YouTube views have become just as important as the live numbers, perhaps even more so due to their ability to reach an international audience and the shifting strategies of the network model. Peak TV, with its seemingly limitless options and expansion of platforms, means those coveted demographics are less likely to stay up and watch the talk shows (or fall asleep on the couch with a network channel on rather than Netflix). That means getting creative, from cringe-inducing social media campaigns to the good old (new?) viral video.

Since its inception, Fallon’s tenure on The Tonight Show has been leaps and bounds ahead of the competition in terms of making an impact online. Indeed, his entire show seems tailor-made to be cut up into easily digestible chunks and linked to on your auntie’s Facebook page. With an eye-watering subscriber count sitting at over 13.6m users, Fallon, in theory, has a captive audience of young people (YouTube’s most popular demographic) ready to be entertained with children’s party games, sing-alongs, and publicist sanctioned buffoonery.

The five most viewed videos on his channel are all of a similar breed - Ariana Grande and Christina Aguilera doing musical impressions (combined total of 164,569,039 views); Emma Stone’s lip sync battle before that show became its own torrid spin-off (81,752,397 views); Daniel Radcliffe doing Alphabet Aerobics (73,721,012 views); and Jimmy on a roller coaster with Kevin Heart (66,591,775 views). You do the maths on those numbers. We as a culture are bound by few common elements, but watching celebrities do silly things is one of them.

The formula is key: Big name celebrities plus relatable party games with a skillful edge, all wrapped up in escapist fluff. It’s no surprise that this much-imitated strategy - I’m looking at you, James Corden - comes from a former SNL alum, particularly one known for his own musical impressions. What’s most striking about these videos is how little Fallon himself appears. He steps back and lets the stars do the work, although he’s always in frame, reminding you of whose show this is. With the Radcliffe rap, he watches from behind, enraptured and gurning for his life; he’s front and centre with Adele in her classroom instruments sing-along with The Roots; he’s in lazy drag screaming “ewww” with will.i.am. Even in the one exclusively interview-style clip with over 35m views (the Nicole Kidman interview where she revealed Fallon blew a chance to date her), it’s all about him. It’s a perpetual series of SNL skits, but with even more corpsing (“breaking” for our US readers).

It’s also notable how absent politics is from his most viewed videos. Michelle Obama doing Mom Dancing with Fallon has over 25m views, but it’s hardly shop talk. A skit with Donald Trump interviewing himself in the mirror (Fallon in costume) has over 20m hits, while an awkward skit of Obama calling Trump with some advice has over 17m hits, yet it’s clear that’s not what his audience wanted. Or at least, it’s not what his audience wanted at the time. None of his top 30 most viewed videos are from the past twelve months. The most recent video of Fallon’s to pass 1m views was political, focusing on an interview with The Rock and his much-rumoured Presidential hopes. It’s not that Fallon’s YouTube numbers are necessarily bad, but in the face of more strident and urgent competition both on and off the air, it’s notable how those demographics are shifting.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is a couple of years behind Fallon’s channel in terms of numbers, with only 2.6m subscribers to their name. When Colbert started hosting, you could see the ways the show tried to replicate the Fallon mould of viral content. They released cute videos leading up to the show’s release, did some similar skits and had guests do adorably wacky feats for the clicks. It was obvious that this wasn’t Colbert’s wheelhouse, nor was it what viewers wanted. Even in the wobblier days of the show’s inception, people turned to those political moments, like the wonderful Joe Biden interview or the less wonderful Ted Cruz one. Perhaps people just missed the Colbert of truthiness, or couldn’t shake their expectations of who Colbert was and how he should host a late-night show.

It’s certainly understandable that such a weight on his shoulder, not just from viewers but CBS, could be restricting for him. In those early days, you get the sense that Colbert is keen to stop being that person and all that entails - that authoritative voice of comedic leadership during tough political times, more so now that Jon Stewart isn’t on the air. Yet when the tides turned and viewers hungered for that, he delivered, and it’s reflected in those YouTube views.

Of Colbert’s 20 most viewed videos, 16 are political in theme, from that awful Trump interview to Laura Benanti’s spot-on Melania impression to Colbert helping President Obama with his résumé to the return of Stewart himself. What’s most striking here is how Colbert is the heart of basically all these videos. Not only is he more actively involved as an interviewer - a skill he possesses in droves compared to Fallon - he is also viewed more for his monologues. Viewers are turning to him, his voice and his opinions on the most pressing and petrifying news of the hour. Colbert is definitively against Trump, there’s no hiding that in his act, and the fans are flocking to him. As of the writing of this post, Fallon’s most recent ten videos had a combined 935,894 views. For Colbert’s ten, he had 1,039,922 views. Fallon’s most viewed video didn’t even feature him (it’s a clip of Demi Lovato performing), while Colbert’s top spot came from a monologue on Trump’s budget.

Late night is a wildly different game from the heady days of the Leno-Letterman feud. There are more late night options than ever before - although almost all of them are still straight white men - and the concept of “essential viewing” has lost much of its power. There’s never going to be another Jon Stewart, for example, because there’s less hunger for that leader-style comedic voice, especially one from such a narrow pool of diversity. With the game changing, the online battle has amped up to bigger levels: Who can reach the widest audience and what message do they use to do that?

Often overlooked in the new late night battles is the rise of Trevor Noah. The ratings for his tenure on The Daily Show are growing, and his online presence is increasingly savvy. Last week was his most watched week ever, and his cut of the 18-49 audience is 18% higher than last year. Comedy Central have been savvy in making their show reach as wide an international audience as possible, not by making the content universal but by specifying it to particular regions. Noah’s show is now watched in 176 countries, up from around 70 before, and, as noted by Uproxx, tapings will film segments meant for worldwide audiences. This obviously fits with the sensibilities of having a South African host for what’s usually seen as an American satirical show, and the numbers speak for themselves. On Comedy Central’s UK YouTube channel, the past 5 clips from The Daily Show have a staggering 1,834,369 views. On the show’s own channels, the most recent 5 clips have over 2.8m views. The hunger for satire is most certainly alive and well, and Noah knows that’s universal.

Other late-night hosts use their online presence for varying purposes - Conan O’Brien has tailored much of his show to an internet specific geek audience with video game Lets-Plays and Comic Con footage; Jimmy Kimmel keeps a sardonic edge but isn’t afraid to get political or sincere, and James Corden’s just perfected the Fallon mould, but his foreignness allows him to escape accusations of avoiding serious topics. Fallon’s network buddy Seth Meyers avoids silly skits almost entirely, and his most viewed videos are concise, detailed and easily digestible takes on the latest politics and news, ideal for explaining to that one stubborn relative why taking away your healthcare and letting everyone die in the street is a bad idea.

None of this is to say that Fallon is in danger of becoming irrelevant or unwatched. There will always be a need and a desire for frothy escapades and celebrity silliness as pleasant distractions. The issue is that, as demonstrated by Fallon’s profile in the New York Times, he doesn’t seem to understand why such frivolities could be considered lightweight or distracting in this new age. As the heat is turned up and NBC will undoubtedly put the pressure on Fallon to get his numbers back up over Colbert’s, it will be interesting to see if his online strategy changes, and more politics enters his scope. He has already said that he’s not a political comedian, but if the clicks aren’t coming, perhaps he’ll change his tune.

[DJM77]

Originally Posted by Alan Brady's Hair

Fallon himself has weighed in, opining that his announcer is "a bigger butt - kisser than Ed McMahon."

https://www.google.com/search?q=ed+m...6fHyaI1y_kAoM:

[TMC]

Originally Posted by robyrob

definitely not better than Carson.

Fallon has his followers and viewers, he's big with younger viewers and those with short attention spans; but he's a terrible interviewer, his bits are thin and repetitive and he's just a one-trick pony.

Carson really was a great interviewer, had the best spectrum of guests and always brought out the best in them, he had a amazingly quick-witted mind and was consistently funny on multiple levels.

Jimmy Fallon always strikes me as a goofy, overly enthusiastic fan-boy who is giddy that he finally gets to meet his "idols" and therefore has to excessively brown-nose and butter them up.

I do agree Jimmy's shtick can be extremely superficial and repetitive if you're exposed to him for so long. Maybe if Jimmy actually had some edge or bite in his comedy outside of his affable, goofball man-child, pop culture obsessed, frat-boy act then we could overlook that sort of shortcoming.

[robyrob]

well, I am willing to agree that Jimmy IS better than A Carson - Ronnie Carson; he's a kid I knew back in fifth grade that used to eat paste.