Jimmy Fallon Blames His Political Cowardice on Johnny Carson

The President of the United States is at war with late-night comedians, having recently called for the cancellation of pretty much every TV comic whose surname isn’t “Gutfeld.” So in the face of this apparent authoritarian censorship, Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon has bravely decided to do as little as humanly possible.

Fallon just outlined his plans for The Tonight Show, which involve being entirely apolitical and ignoring the world around us. What more would you expect from the guy who responded to Jimmy Kimmel’s initial suspension with the kind of empty platitudes you’d expect to find in the dumpster behind the Hallmark offices. 

Speaking with CNBC, per The Daily Beast, Fallon made it clear that he isn’t just avoiding the late-night censorship wars, he’s already bolted from the front line and is currently fleeing the battlefield with the speed of an Olympic runner. “Our show’s never really been that political,” Fallon sweatily proclaimed. “We hit both sides equally. And we try to make everybody laugh,” he stressed with a desperate, soulless smile, adding that, “our monologues are kind of, you know, the same that we’ve been doing since Johnny Carson was doing The Tonight Show.”

“So really I just keep my head down and make sure the jokes are funny,” he continued. “We’re just trying to make the best show we possibly can and entertain everybody.”

Okay, there are a few problems with Fallon’s “this is how Carson did it” argument. For one thing, Carson literally didn’t make fun of “both sides equally.” In 1988, media researchers discovered that Carson’s monologues were “twice as heavy on the Republicans as on the Democrats.”

But that doesn’t even matter. Fallon’s argument is fallacious because Carson clearly never went out of his way to poke fun at the left purely in an effort to sidestep FCC persecution. And he likely never withheld jokes because he feared the wrath of an overly-sensitive president whose ego can’t handle the slightest modicum of public ridicule. 

And what does Fallon mean by saying that his show’s not political? On YouTube, like half of his video thumbnails are a split screen of Donald Trump and Jimmy Fallon seemingly straining to focus his eyes and read his cue cards. 

Fallon keeping his “head down” in the Trump 2.0 era is just his latest spineless attempt to make a show for “everybody”/boost the potential clientele for whatever depressing merchandising push he has planned for the holiday season. 

But hey, at least Fallon was able to advertise his dumb show about advertising.