Judd: Ten years.
Jim: Well, I’d never done this before. How’d we do, by the way? Did we do okay?
Ben: We can always come back and do it again.
Jim: Let’s start it over. We’re going to do it again. Turn it over and I’ll be you this time, Judd.
This interview was originally featured on the DVD of The Cable Guy and appears courtesy of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
JIMMY FALLON (2015)
I don’t understand Jimmy Fallon. He’s fast, witty, handsome, musical, inventive, a confident performer, a great listener—and he is definitely having more fun than the rest of us combined. I always thought comedy came from pain. I thought the people who created it were drawing from some bottomless well of existential angst. I thought it was impossible to do it well if you are also an enthusiastic, hopeful, energetic person. Most talk show hosts are fun to watch because they seem so miserable, but Jimmy is the opposite. He is more of a Steve Allen or Martin Short type of guy. He is exactly what he seems to be when you see him on TV—a warm, chipper, funny guy. A good person. I wanted to speak with him to figure out how he became this way—with the secret hope that it would help me shed some of my old, boring, neurotic, my-pain-is-so-old-I-don’t-even-remember-where-it-came-from BS. I think I got my answer but I am not sure I can make it work for me. (I think he is happy because he is not a Jew.)
Judd Apatow: I had the loveliest time with your wife at the wedding the other night.
Jimmy Fallon: She just got back. She’s like, “Thank God for Judd Apatow. He was fantastic.”
Judd: I was a stand-in for you.
Jimmy: Did you do all my bits?
Judd: Yeah. If she didn’t look over, she may have thought that you were there.
Jimmy: Was it fun or was it just a wedding?
Judd: It was great. When you go to a wedding and Lionel Richie comes out and sings “I’m Easy,” what more do you want?
Jimmy: Goose bumps.
Judd: He was really funny, too. I always get annoyed when someone like that is funny.
Jimmy: I know. What did he say, “I only do this if I get paid or invited,” or something?
Judd: Yeah. (Laughs) I was—I wanted to say, “Hey, I used your song ‘Hello’ in The 40-Year-Old Virgin!” But then I realized I used it in the sequence where Steve Carell prepared to masturbate.
Jimmy: That’s why I don’t go out anymore. Because I’ll see somebody—“Oh, hey, I just talked about you. I talked about your bad plastic surgery. Sorry!”
Judd: That’s your biggest conflict. You have no choice but to be nice to their face, and then take them down in the monologue.
Jimmy: (Laughs) What a big tough guy I am.
Judd: Someone told me a funny story about the South Park guys—they had, I guess, torn Janeane Garofalo apart in something, and then they were in a restaurant and saw her across the way, and just ran away before they could be spotted.
Jimmy: Did you ever hear the story about Wayne Newton punching Johnny Carson?
Judd: No, no.
Jimmy: There’s a story that Wayne Newton got pissed off that Johnny Carson was making jokes about him, so he stormed into his office, past his secretary, grabbed his collar, and said, “You say one more joke about me and I’ll fucking knock your block off.” I don’t think Johnny mentioned him ever again.
Judd: I love people almost getting in fistfights over jokes.
Jimmy: What is wrong with people?
Judd: Your show seems so well run. I guess my first question—as somebody who had to run shows when I didn’t know how to do it—would be how, in the beginning, did you know how to set up your show, not only for it to work comedically, but for it to be a place that was happy and functional?
Jimmy: We just went in knowing that we might get canceled. And if you’re going to go down, you have to go down doing what you like doing and what’s fun for you, because I don’t ever want to do something painful and then have everyone go, “Hey, that works. Keep doing that painful thing for years.”
Judd: SNL is famous for being a survival-of-the-fittest atmosphere. It’s almost built for people to turn on each other because everyone is under so much pressure to get on the show. But all these other shows that Lorne produced seem like happy places.
Jimmy: It’s so—I watch SNL all the time and I see a new cast member, and I think, Oh, man, no one’s going to write for that person next week. Because they scored too hard.
Judd: (Laughs)
Jimmy: Got to take them down a notch.
Judd: You’re very close to Lorne. What is the thing you think people don’t understand about him?
Jimmy: Maybe that he does not care about money. He’s very successful, so he doesn’t need money, but it’s like—if it was anyone else, they would have made some contract deal where they would get five percent of every person who leaves to become uber-famous. Will Ferrell would be giving Lorne five percent after the next Anchorman. But Lorne doesn’t care. He’s proud of the people who do something else off the show. It makes him happy.
Judd: What was exciting about SNL—well, I’m a little bit older than you, but when SNL was originally on, it was before the VCR was something that most people had. And when SNL was on, you really thought, I may never get to see this again. You had to watch it because there was no way to know if you would ever get another shot at it.
Jimmy: I taped every Saturday Night Live as soon as I could afford videotapes. I taped every episode that I could tape. Then I would go to my friend’s house with the tape and show them the best sketches—you got to see Chris Farley and stuff like that, you know. I was like the human Funny or Die.
Judd: Where did you grow up?
Jimmy: Saugerties, New York, which is Woodstock.
Judd: Did you have friends who loved comedy? Because I was totally alone. No one gave a shit.
Jimmy: I had a good crew of maybe like five to ten kids I could watch the tapes with. They’d have a party and sneak booze in the basement or something and I’d come in with a tape and show a couple of funny sketches, and they’d all laugh, and we’d just hang out and listen to music and stuff like that. I was really into it. And then my dad bought a VCR, because he wanted the video camera that came with the VCR that attached with the wire—
Judd: Yeah.
Jimmy:—and you had to carry around a box.
Judd: (Laughs)
Jimmy: He used that to tape home movies, but I used it to tape Saturday Night Live. They had like a weird rerun thing of Saturday Night Live that was on in the eighties. I taped Saturday Night Live as well, but they also ran old ones from the seventies.
Judd: I remember that.
Jimmy: And so I used to tape them, but I couldn’t always play the tapes back because that was the only VCR we had in the house, so what I would do is play back Richard Pryor’s monologue, and record it on a reel-to-reel that I bought at a garage sale. Then I would go up in my room and play it and lip-sync Richard Pryor’s monologue in the mirror.
Judd: Oh my God.
Jimmy: I did Steve Martin, too. I would do all of their bits and lip-sync them like they were songs.
Judd: I’m always fascinated what draws people to doing any of this, but you seemed to have super-cool, healthy parents.