Ever watched The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and wondered how Jimmy is brought so easily to laughter? As if he’s sitting in your living room with friends, yukking it up just for your benefit?
Well, when I found out two years ago that I’d be working on The Tonight Show as a production assistant, I was as ignorant as you. Could it be caffeine? I wondered. Other stimulants? Or was it just Jimmy’s nervous, excitable personality? Imagine my surprise when I showed up for the first 5 p.m. taping of my time on the show and discovered that it was none of these things.
The manic energy of Jimmy’s nightly performance does have its secret spark. There’s no shame to it, but it’s not something Jimmy would want his competitors to know. It is no less than the secret behind the laughter. I reveal it at great personal and professional risk, because it will be of keen interest to so many in the entertainment industry.
I don’t think it was always this way. Perhaps before I worked on the show, Jimmy was carefree; he liked his guests well enough, they liked him, their stories and quips tickled his mind and brought him to those paroxysms of glee. But it never could have lasted. As amusing as it may have been in the halcyon days to learn all the various ways that famous people get along famously with one another, the routine must have grown dull and wearying several hundred episodes on.
Jimmy is not one to let standards slip, however, and devised an ingenious means of simulating the bonhomie that once came so naturally. You might assume that his gusts and gales of maniacal laughter, accompanied by clapping, pounding of the fist on the table, and keeling over as if wounded in the abdomen, still bore some relationship to what his guests were saying. Not so. These days, the source of Jimmy’s amusement is what he secretly reads on a teleprompter placed behind the guests, off camera: the full text of PG Wodehouse’s 1938 novel Code of the Woosters.
Shocked? It will pass. As you think it over, the clarion ring of truth will cut through the murmur of doubts. Of course! The intentionally ludicrous plotting, Bertram Wooster’s absurd similes, Jeeves’ wry understatement, and the skillfully drawn cast of ancillary characters: the explosive Aunt Dahlia, her eccentric, indigestion-prone husband Tom Travers, the naïve, impressionable lovers Gussie Fink-Nottle and Madeleine Bassett, the menacing, mustachioed minor dictator, Roderick Spode.
Whether Wodehouse was Jimmy’s selection, a favorite from his youth, or the masterful choice of some NBC executive, I cannot say. So many wide-eyed interns and junior staff, like me, have pondered this. The celebrity guests, for their own protection, are allowed to come to the realization more gradually. It occurs to them that Jimmy’s eyes seem often to stray from theirs to something behind them in the middle distance, and that while their practiced anecdotes elicit laughter in any company, there is in Jimmy’s guffaws something different, something of the innocent joy of the schoolboy, he who sits in the back of the bus with a well-thumbed paperback, retreating from the braggadocious, profane talk of his colleagues into a delightful, vernal world of country houses, cow creamers, and cantankerous constables.
What you do with this information is up to you, but I wouldn’t be too harsh on Jimmy. Without the eternal spring of Code of the Woosters, The Tonight Show would be a recursive nightmare, an agony of forced merriment, taking a little more out of him each time. Think not of him, but of his viewers.
You’re wondering what their secret is, aren’t you? How could they possibly still be entertained, five nights a week, after all these years? Let me tell you something. They genuinely enjoy the show. They are amused because they see that Jimmy is amused. And knowing this, we can come to appreciate his power as a performer. Laughter is contagious; who cares for its pathogenesis?
