A video went viral this week showing Jimmy Fallon re-using the same joke again and again on The Tonight Show.
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Fallon takes the late night stage five nights a week for his talk show, so a few things are bound to sound similar. Still, a video posted to YouTube on Wednesday showed him making the same joke at least four times, nearly word-for-word. In a segment called “Screen Grabs,” Fallon shows suggestive or funny phrases that turn up in captcha tests.
“You know those squiggly words you have to type in before you can buy tickets to concerts and stuff?” Fallon explained in each of the clips. The odd phrases Fallon highlighted ranged from overtly suggestive to vaguely off-putting, yet the punchline was always the same. Fallon assumed a nasal voice and called out to an imaginary wife.
“Honey, I’m getting those tickets you wanted,” he said. Then, looking shocked he added: “Don’t come in here!”
Each time, the crowd laughed and cheered, despite the similarity of the jokes. While repeatable joke formats are the bread and butter of late night talk shows, they rarely use the same punchline so often. In the comment section, many took this as vindication for their dislike of Fallon.
“It’s not even a joke though,” one person wrote.
“The only thing Jimmy Fallon should host is a parasite,” added another.
“Bwahahahaha! That’s the saddest thing I’ve seen a talk show host do, especially a cringy guy like Fallon,” added a third. “But then again, I’ve seen Craig Ferguson recycle s—ty old jokes on his show as well.”
I few dropped into the comments to defend the joke, writing that Fallon was merely repeating the format of a joke and not the joke itself. There was some arguement about the mechanics of comedy — premise, set-up, punchline and so on — yet many who defended him still found other reasons to dislike Fallon.
“Jimmy’s impersonations of celebrities are amazing and his goofy voices like this one are hilarious. The voice that he does here is a bit of an ode to Jerry Lewis’ Nutty Professor character,” one person wrote. “But, what I don’t find amusing is his constant fawning over EVERY guest and those stupid millennial bar-type games. Now THOSE are cringeworthy!”
Fallon’s show took perhaps its fiercest criticism at the end of the 2016 presidential election, when he had now-President Donald Trump on as a guest. Many felt that Fallon’s humanization legitimized the candidate and helped ensure his election. He has been fighting to return to late night dominance ever since.
