The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon
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The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon
Originally published in our magazine’s hallowed print edition
2026<br>Mar/Apr
Details
Under the sterile blue lights of his studio, Fallon laughs endlessly at the same pseudo-jokes, rubs elbows with Trump and Sam Altman, and ushers in the death of culture.
Jon Greenaway
filed 20 April 2026<br>in
Media
There is a distinctive, deeply uncanny horror to the way Jimmy Fallon laughs. Look it up—there are literally hundreds of videos showing him breaking out into laughter at the slightest provocation. It is not a reaction (he sometimes won’t even wait for his guest to get to their carefully scripted punchline). Rather, it is a performance, a sudden, corporeal convulsion.
Fallon leans in his chair, as if pressed back by some unseen force. It’s accompanied by the ritualistic slapping of the desk, a sound that echoes like a gavel in a courtroom. Watching the Tonight Show in the deep hours of the night, beaming out from a phone screen or laptop, there’s an unshakeable impression that this is not really entertainment but a desperate kind of ritual.
Fallon acts as the high priest of a terrified optimism, his rictus grin serving as a shield against the encroaching silence of the real. Here, in the sanitized, over-lit heart of the American culture industry, there is an inescapable horror. But it isn't a monster lurking in the shadows; it is the manic, unblinking insistence that actually, there are no shadows at all. If the Gothic tradition of fear teaches us that the ruins of the past haunt the present, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon offers the inverse: a present so forcefully flattened, so aggressively “fun,” that it has exorcised history entirely, leaving us trapped in a sterile, eternal loop of viral games and celebrity lip-syncing while the world slides into climate collapse and fascist politics.
A typical episode of Fallon’s Tonight Show has the usual staples of the late-night format, the ones introduced by Steve Allen all the way back in the 1950s and perfected by Johnny Carson: an opening monologue, a couple of celebrity interviews, a musical performance to close out the evening. But what’s made Fallon so popular has been his use of endless, repetitive, shareable games. Night after night, he invites you to watch people you know from other shows on TV, or who just coincidentally have a movie or an album to promote, play Pictionary. Watch them Lip Sync Battle! When watching almost any video that goes viral from The Tonight Show, all I can think is: “haven’t I seen this already?” Of course I have—we all have. The whole point of these dance challenges, or singing challenges or party games, is that they are fundamentally repeated gestures. They’re shared, copied, and endlessly reproduced.
These games are not true “play” in the revolutionary sense of the word, wherein games are unscripted, free, and disruptive. Instead, they represent the total commodification of play. In a cultural landscape dominated by the attention economy and defined by precarious labor and existential dread, Fallon presents play not as an escape from work, but as an obligatory task that must be performed, a contractual obligation to a marketing team. He recently joined forces with the soulless monstrosity that is State Farm to shill their insurance, and in a great detail, their ad highlights that you don’t actually need to tell a joke for Jimmy to appear. You just need to say the word “joking” to summon him like a cheap simulacra of Bloody Mary or Candyman. Advertising Fallon is indistinguishable from him on the show—after all, he’s doing exactly the same thing.
Jimmy Fallon and “Jake from State Farm” in a 2023 TV ad.
Fallon and his pseudo-play are, as Bo Burnham pointed out in a 2016 standup set, the end of culture: “People we’ve seen too much of, mouthing along to songs we’ve heard too much of.” Celebrities fucking around in front of us to take up our time and our attention.
Watching the Tonight Show is an exercise in cultural deja-vu. It’s the endless repetition of the already familiar in a setting that is designed to gain our attention, but makes no other demand upon us as a viewer. The familiar cry of “Let people enjoy things” might come in response. But this? This is what we’re supposed to enjoy? As Kate Wagner writes for The Baffler:
It may appear somewhat cruel to take entertainment to task. But the far worse alternative would be a world without criticism—a world well-wishing people are now working to build for their bosses, one where monopolistic media conglomerates cater to our simplest desires and most superficial political awareness. Until we are all forced to...