Jimmy Fallon is “keeping his head down” during late-night TV’s battle with the Trump administration, the notoriously apolitical host said Tuesday, as he reiterated he wouldn’t be trading shots with the president no matter how many times he threatens to have his show axed.
“Our show’s never really been that political,” Fallon told CNBC Tuesday morning, when asked how he was thinking about his job in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension after threats from Trump’s FCC Chairman. “We hit both sides equally and we try to make everybody laugh,” he continued.
But the White House is not laughing no matter how neutral Fallon tries to be.
Trump has repeatedly said the Tonight Show host has “no talent,” and declared him a “total loser,” despite their chummy, hair-tussling chat when Trump appeared on the show in 2016, and Fallon’s aversion to “dipping into” political comedy.
The month after his friendly interview with Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, who had just advocated that conservatives embrace calling themselves “Nazis,” Fallon once again insisted being neutral is “what makes our show work.”
“Our monologues are the same we’ve been doing since Johnny Carson was doing The Tonight Show, so really I just keep my head down and make sure the jokes are funny,” Fallon, who was on CNBC to promote his new marketing competition show On Brand, said, as his late-night peers risk their careers to speak up against censorship. “We’re just trying to make the best show we possibly can and entertain everybody.”
Notably, as Trump directly threatened Fallon’s show, Kimmel pleaded with his fans to come to his fellow host’s defense should his show experience a Trumpian shutdown like the one that hit Jimmy Kimmel Live!
“We have to speak out against this because he’s not stopping,” Kimmel said in his first monologue after the suspension. “He was somehow able to squeeze Colbert out of CBS. Then he turned his sights on me, and now he’s openly rooting for NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers and the hundreds of Americans who work for their shows who don’t make millions of dollars. And I hope that if that happens or if there’s even any hint of that happening, you will be 10 times as loud as you were this week.”
Fallon did not have similarly strong words of solidarity either on CNBC Tuesday or on his own show after Kimmel was silenced.
The Tonight Show host’s monologue that first night of Kimmel’s suspension included a couple of lame jokes about his dad not knowing which of the hosts named Jimmy had been suspended and the laughable suggestion that “I don’t know what’s going on, and no one does.”
He did manage to include a paltry, “I do know Jimmy Kimmel, and he’s a decent, funny, and loving guy. I hope he comes back.”
Fallon has talked at length before about why he steers clear of politics. He told Today in 2017, “I don’t really even, you know, care that much about politics… I’m just not that brain, you know? I think the other guys are doing it very well.” Addressing the backlash to his chumminess during Trump’s appearance on his show the previous year, Fallon told TMZ, “I’m never too hard on anyone.”
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