Jimmy Fallon Is Here For A Good Time (And A Long Time)
Growing up in Brooklyn under the shadows of 30 Rock and the Manhattan skyline, all Jimmy Fallon wanted was to be on Saturday Night Live. He’d stay up at night as a teenager, drinking a beer benevolently left out by his parents and snacking on a bowl of chips, laughing by himself in the semi-darkness, planning his future. “I preferred to watch it by myself,” he says, “because I really wanted to focus. I didn’t want anyone talking over it or saying, ‘I dunno, that’s not so funny.’ I just didn’t want to hear anyone else’s opinion.”
He idolized that first couple of casts: Belushi, Gilda Radner and Chevy Chase, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman. He used to do Chase-like pratfalls down his stairs onto a pile of paper plates. “And then I’d stand up and go, ‘Live, From New York, it’s Saturday Night!’”
Eventually, Fallon would get to yell that line for real, over and over again for the better part of a decade. That’s probably how you know him, actually, as a member of the early 2000s SNL cast — that boyish guy cracking up behind Will Ferrell or Tina Fey, visibly having the time of his life.
By that measure of success — achieving his “ultimate, ultimate, ultimate goal” — Fallon has more than exceeded even his own expectations. He’s blown past all markers, really. That dream came true 15 years ago. All the rest? The movies, Late Night, The Tonight Show? That’s just icing on the cake.
“I never thought about hosting The Tonight Show or replacing Johnny Carson,” he says. “I never thought there would be a replacement for Johnny Carson. I thought he just came with the television set.”
