NEW YORK -- Ambling onto the Art Deco set of The Tonight Show for his monologue rehearsal on a Monday afternoon, Jimmy Fallon gives the crowd here at Studio 6B a warm, practiced welcome before trying out a new batch of jokes about the French election, pop star Harry Styles and President Donald Trump's definitions of medical terms. "He thinks a cardiologist is someone who works at Hallmark," he quips.
Wearing casual clothes and a boyish smirk, Fallon made a pitch for his program's vision. "Anything I can make fun of, I will make fun of," he tells his audience. The late-night entertainment being fine-tuned in front of them, he adds, had been devised so that "you go to bed with a smile on your face and you have sweet dreams."
Then he stepped to the spot where he delivers his monologue each evening and noted that the stage mark was in the shape of a four-leaf clover. "I'm Irish," he explains, "and I need all the luck I can get."
It was a throwaway, self-deprecating line, but also an accurate self-assessment from Fallon, 42, who is in his fourth year of hosting The Tonight Show, NBC's flagship late-night program.
He is weathering the most tumultuous period in his tenure there -- a predicament for which he has himself to thank, and one that raises the question of whether the multitalented but apolitical Fallon can ride out the current era of politicized, choose-your-side entertainment, when he just wants to have a good time.
Once the undisputed juggernaut of the late-night category, Fallon's Tonight Show, a celebrity-friendly cavalcade of games and gags, has seen its ratings decline in recent months. Meanwhile, his politically pointed competitor Stephen Colbert, who hosts CBS' The Late Show, has closed what was once a formidable gap of nearly 1 million viewers.
The resurgent interest in left-leaning programming hasn't helped Fallon, a former star of Saturday Night Live who has built his brand on his all-around entertainer's skills and down-the-middle tastes. And as Fallon is well aware, viewers haven't seen him in quite the same light since an interview he conducted with Trump in September, which was widely criticized for its fawning, forgiving tone. In a gesture that has come to haunt the host, he concluded the segment by playfully running his fingers through Trump's hair.
Fallon acknowledges now that the Trump interview was a setback, if not quite a mistake, and he has absorbed at least a portion of the anger that was directed at him by critics and online detractors.
"They have a right to be mad," a chastened Fallon says. "If I let anyone down, it hurt my feelings that they didn't like it. I got it."
But if these events prompted Fallon to search his soul, he says they did not compel him to make widespread changes at The Tonight Show.
The program is still profitable and strongly supported by advertisers, so if Fallon faces any crisis, it's an existential one: What if the broader shift to a more partisan, more openly anti-Trump late-night isn't temporary? If it has a longer life and a bigger impact than anyone foresees, what does he want his show to be?
As strongly as ever, Fallon believes it should be a place for a wide swath of viewers to get their entertainment and laughs, and that this philosophy will steer it through a period of intense polarization.
"I don't want to be bullied into not being me, and not doing what I think is funny," he says more defiantly. "Just because some people bash me on Twitter, it's not going to change my humor or my show."
He added: "It's not The Jimmy Fallon Show. It's The Tonight Show."
There was a time when Fallon's lip-sync battles and facetious thank-you notes gave The Tonight Show dominance. At the end of 2016, it was handily winning its time slot with around 3.5 million viewers a night.
Not five months later, Colbert usually surpasses Fallon in overall nightly audience. In a recent week, Colbert drew more than 3 million viewers, while Fallon had just under 2.7 million. The Tonight Show has continued to win the coveted 18-to-49 demographic that is especially valued by advertisers.
Fallon claims he pays no attention to these metrics. "We're winning in something," he says. "People in the height requirement between 5-7 and 5-11, we're No. 1, from 11:50 to 11:55." More emphatically, he added: "I never, ever care. I'll know when someone fires me."
Even so, in recent weeks, as Colbert has drawn headlines for a lewd joke about Trump and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin; and Jimmy Kimmel, the host of ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live!, has touched off a political debate by sharing the story of his newborn son's heart surgery, there is a sense that Fallon cannot command the zeitgeist as easily as he used to.
Weekend on 05/25/2017