Here’s Why Doing Things the Johnny Carson Way Won’t Work in 2025
Don’t blame Jimmy Fallon for not speaking truth to power like his late-night counterparts — he’s just carrying on the legacy of a Tonight Show legend. “Our monologues are kind of the same that we’ve been doing since Johnny Carson was hosting the Tonight Show,” Fallon said during a CNBC interview this week. “So really, I just keep my head down and make sure the jokes are funny.”
For now, let’s set aside the question of whether or not Fallon’s jokes are funny and focus on whether he’s simply doing what Johnny would have done. It’s an argument that’s debatable and, more to the point, irrelevant.
It’s true that Carson was careful about revealing his political point of view, choosing to tell jokes about President Jimmy Carter’s bumbling brother Billy or dress up as Ronald Reagan for silly sketches. “Why lose 50 percent of my audience?” he’d say, according to the biography, Johnny Carson: A Taut Portrait of a Complex Man. It’s a line that Jay Leno clipped and pasted into his (hypocritical) comedy playbook.
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And yet, Carson’s political jokes pushed the boundaries of the time. Tonight Show host Steve Allen would never have dressed up as President Eisenhower and made fun of his bumbling speech patterns. His replacement, Jack Paar, wasn’t ridiculing wayward Kennedy family members in his monologues. Viewed through the lens of history, Carson’s pokes at politicians were positively edgy — not Lenny Bruce edgy, but testing the limits of what network television allowed in the 1970s.
Fallon’s choice to “just keep his head down” isn’t an homage to Carson. Johnny changed the late-night game, welcoming controversial young comics like George Carlin and Richard Pryor and introducing them to mainstream audiences. He pushed boundaries with jokes about sex and changing social mores, subjects that would make prude Steve Allen blush. Before his unforgivable feud with Joan Rivers, Carson did the unthinkable, making a female comic his permanent guest host. His Tonight Show wasn’t about repeating the successes of Jack Paar — he broke new ground and made his own history.
If razor-sharp Carson was on late-night in 2025, does Fallon really think he’d bury his head in the sand while his counterparts were satirizing the state of the nation? If anything, the hypercompetitive Carson (see that unforgivable feud with Rivers) would be trying to outdo them. FCC chest-beating aside, late-night comics in 2025 have much more latitude to speak their minds, and it’s hard to imagine Carson not seizing the opportunity.
“We’re just trying to make the best show we possibly can and entertain everybody,” protested Fallon. Carson certainly entertained everybody — he had the only late-night show in his day, so he got all the viewers by default.
Those days are long gone, however, and “entertain everybody” is a mantra for another time. There’s a reason Fallon’s squeamish approach consistently finished behind Kimmel and Colbert in recent years. Jokes designed not to offend anyone entertain almost no one.
And maverick Carson wouldn’t have appreciated Fallon hiding behind his ghost to justify his cowardly comedy.
