Just wondering.
I’ll never know.
Is he Ben Stein’s former sidekick? Or is that the other guy.
He’s never been funny before, why should he start now?
ZING!!
As long as he thinks he’s funny he never will be. He ruined every single skit he was ever in on SNL by breaking character and laughing. For that reason alone I detest him.
Jimmy Kimmel.
Jimmy Kimmel is the former Ben Stein guy, now on ABC.
Jimmy Fallon is the former SNL guy, now the new Late Night host on NBC.
I’m a connoisseur of late night comedy shows so I’ve been watching him evolve over the past six months. He’s definitely gotten a lot more comfortable with hosting his own show, and the sketches and remotes he does are put together a lot better. The writing on his monologue has improved, but he still has a lot of trouble reading off the cards.
He is much, much better in interviews and unscripted desk bits where his actual personality really comes through. He can be quite charming and entertaining.
I say you’ll need to give the show at least a year before you can make any real judgments. It took Conan three years before he was any good.
There was something funny on last night’s show (8-21-09).
Only, Jimmy didn’t know that it was.
Jimmy was showing pictures of himself, at various events. He had one picture where he is playing a bean-bag toss game. He said he was playing “Bags” which is a localized variant of the game.
He asked the audience, innocently enough if that was the name. One person offered the OTHER (actual) name of the game :
Cornhole
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornhole
Jimmy was obviously taken back by what he heard, but the at home audience didn’t. He asked again “Really?! That’s what you call it? For those of you at home that didn’t hear it, it starts with the word corn.”
Jimmy couldn’t quite regain his composure for the rest of the segment.
**
So. Uh, the show is getting better?** [He was obviously nervous on his first night] He has grown into the show.** Is the show funny yet? Not so much.**
Then again, if you ask me Conan is still taking a while to get back into it. [Just me, or is his hair not the same anymore?]
I agree that Conan and especially Andy Richter are not yet comfortable with the new setting-----Over-reliance on the same few repetitive bits that are already getting stale, and just a general sense of unease…
I hope he can find his footing soon, as he is getting harder to watch by the week.
I hope Leno can rein it back in some, once he starts.
Ironically, they are billing him with Headlines and Jaywalking [The best two bits, don’t get me wrong…] So, we have the same exact problem with Jay, on the repetitive bits.
He does seem to be getting better looking though. I am still surprised how nice he looks cleaned up.
Saw him, what, last Wednesday night? Almost funny, but that’s been his theme for years. Almost isn’t is, though, so, no, he’s not funny yet.
hh
Yep, that’s my take too.
I was talking about Jimmy Fallon with someone the other day, and i said that i had never watched his show because he annoyed me so much on SNL with all his laughing in the sketches. The person’s response was that it’s OK because laughing at his own jokes is part of Jimmy Fallon’s “thing,” part of his act.
Sorry, but that’s a bullshit excuse.
Conan is the oldest guy to ever take over the Tonight Show , most of the other guys were in their 30s except Leno who was 42. And he’s the first guy who already had a talk show before taking that job. (and he had one for 16 years) Based on that it seemed like he was a pretty safe pick, I think he’s doing well but I didn’t watch his 12:30 show that much.
That was my reaction when Letterman moved from late-night to 11:30/10:30 Central. Maybe Conan is being encouraged by the network marketing boys to keep things simple and predictable for the mass market.
…kind of like a free-form independent radio station changing to a tightly formatted market-slice playlist.
Conan’s audience is 10 years younger than Leno’s so it seems he brought a lot of viewers with him from 12:30.
I think it’s a lot easier to check out the clips on Hulu or the NBC website, than to ask people, as humor is so subjective. For example, I loved Jay. I thought Conan was already getting way too repetitive back in his old time slot. Part of being funny is being unpredictable. Conan seems to thrive more on being edgy. His jokes are funny the first time, though.
I really have never thought that Conan gets the idea of standup. He seems more like he’s just reading his jokes, rather than interacting with his audience. He has to do extra sight gags to get his audience laughing way too often. He always seems stiff, otherwise. Jay, on the hand, communicates more like a familiar friend who just happens to be funny. Telling jokes seems like no big thing to him. And when he does do his repetitive bits, he seems to acknowledge the repetition, and focuses on the parts that are different.
As for Fallon, well, I never found his breaking character to have anything to do with how funny he was. If anything, his laughing functioned like a laugh track, telling it was okay to laugh at him. Still, he did get quite repetitive, and doesn’t seem to do well in his new monologues, perhaps because he lacks someone funnier to bounce it off of, like he did on weekend update. He needs to do more character stuff, IMO.
Oh, and Conan is a good interviewer, and seems to be better than Jay or Fallon at making the guests seem funny when they really aren’t. Jay seems to be better at getting people to answer questions they wouldn’t normally answer, but often seems like he’s upstaging a guest if they are unfunny, which leads to the guests trying to be funny to get the attention back on them, and failing horribly. All I’ve seen from Fallon is that he does a good straight guy when the guest is actually funny. I have not seen enough of his interviews with unfunny guests to see how he handles that.
Yeah, that was probably way to much info for this topic. But it explains where I’m coming from when I say answer the OP: Fallon has gotten funnier, but he hasn’t found his place yet. In other words, even though I came about it differently, I tend to agree with everyone else.