Jimmy Fallon's Fake Laugh Is Not Good

By Petr Navovy | Celebrity | April 7, 2021 |

By Petr Navovy | Celebrity | April 7, 2021 |

Whether it’s his past use of blackface (‘decent apology’ notwithstanding), his lukewarm, middle-of-the-road brand of comedy, or his cuddly treatment of Donald Trump in the lead up to the election of 2016, some of us are not exactly huge fans of Jimmy Fallon here at Pajiba.

The above are all valid criticisms of things that continue to grate me about the man and his show to this day, but what’s been getting on my nerve more and more as the years have gone by is something relatively trivial compared to everything else. It’s that laugh, man. That insincere explosion of full-body spasms and desk-destroying hand smacks that accompanies anything even remotely approaching a punchline delivered by a guest on Fallon’s show.

It’s not news. Everybody’s aware of it. But in recent years, after all the more substantial reasons to be put off by Fallon have piled on, the laugh has just gotten more and more annoying. And I get it—he Fallon needs a fake laugh. A talk show host’s fake laugh is one of the most important tools in their arsenal. That’s how the narcissistic showbiz circle-jerk carnival keeps on trucking. All the more reason for the host to be good at their fake laugh. Fallon … is not.

Why am I bringing this up now? Simple. I just happened to stumble upon a video compilation from 2019 that highlights just how bad Fallon’s laugh really is. SNL breaking clips aside (where I do think he was genuinely trying not to laugh, albeit with less resistance than perhaps he should have), seeing it all side by side like this is really something:

And another friendly reminder that Fallon’s Tonight Show is a Bezos shill:

Thank you @iamjohnoliver for asking @Amazon Alexa about working conditions and union busting #BAmazon in Bessemer, Alabama.

No thank you @jimmyfallon for shutting it down. pic.twitter.com/VbMKho0wY5

— Athena 🦉 (@athenaforall) March 17, 2021

In true form, John Oliver doubled down against being cut off by Jimmy Fallon when spotlighting Amazon's worker abuse. pic.twitter.com/jaqaSmlkwi

— Athena 🦉 (@athenaforall) March 18, 2021

At some point we’ll have a talk about how ruffling Donald Trump’s hair isn’t all that much worse than hosting all the other (Democratic as well as Republican) war criminals that American chat shows love to host on their sofas for cosy chats about which type of pizza they enjoy in between bombing poor people abroad into dust, but we’ll leave that for now.