The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon

Jimmy Fallon is the Caesar Flickerman of America’s Panem era—a plastic-faced showman who generates dangerously hollow entertainment while the world burns. Jon Greenaway delivers a searing takedown of The Tonight Show‘s longtime host: The real, unsettling mechanism of Fallon’s banal horror is its insistence on a radical non-engagement with reality: a position that, in our current political climate, is itself an aggressively political act. Fallon doesn’t do politics, or if he does, he wants to “keep his head down” because “we hit both sides equally.” Tellingly, Donald Trump has called for the firing of almost all of the other late night hosts—Colbert, Kimmel, even Seth Meyers—but excluded Fallon from his hit-list, because Trump recognizes that there’s nothing about Fallon’s empty banality that could be anything close to a threat.