For night owls who love entertainment, The Tonight Show is a genuine television institution. It’s the house that Johnny Carson built, and it has had several different hosts over the years. The most recent host is Jimmy Fallon, who is getting ready to celebrate a major accomplishment: a full decade of hosting The Tonight Show.
The show itself will be honoring Fallon’s momentous achievement with a special May 14 broadcast highlighting the host’s best moments. However, we decided to celebrate Fallon in our own way by picking our favorite moments from his tenure hosting the show.
Want to relive Fallon’s funniest moments as host? Or maybe just find a few killer clips to send your friends? Either way, just keep reading and get ready for some serious laughs!
President Obama’s slow jam skills
Most of Jimmy Fallon’s guests on The Tonight Show have been celebrities…actors, musicians, writers, and so on. Back in 2012, though, he secured perhaps the most impressive guest of all: President Barack Obama. It was a re-election year for Obama, and he used the appearance on the show to tout his many accomplishments.
This might have been dry and boring if not for the choice to have Obama “Slow Jam the News,” listing his accomplishments in a sexy voice and deliberately filling the segment with innuendos. Oh, and he did this all to a killer beat by The Roots. Apparently, Obama had as much fun doing this as he had watching it, and he returned to do the same bit again in 2016.
Michelle Obama gets in on the fun
While Barack Obama was president, his wife Michelle became a major celebrity in her own right. Despite criticism from conservatives, she was very popular in her many media appearances. Often, these appearances were intended to promote things like health initiatives and memoirs, but like her husband, she found time to drop by The Tonight Show and hang with Jimmy Fallon.
Over the course of several appearances, she did hilarious bits like “Evolution of Moms Dancing” or just surprising fans in places like elevators and bookstores. Arguably, though, she was at her best in a skit called “Ew” where she, Fallon, and guest Will Ferrell pretended to be precocious teenage girls hosting a show.
Who knew both the President and the FLOTUS were so funny?
Fallon learned that he was Nicole Kidman’s worst date
Most of the time, funnyman Jimmy Fallon’s punchlines are directed at other people, including fellow celebs and politicians. On one memorable occasion, though, he became the punchline. When Nicole Kidman dropped by in 2015 to promote Paddington, she mentioned visiting Fallon’s apartment with a buddy. She describes the host just sitting there in a baseball cap, saying nothing and playing a video game.
After an hour and a half, she concluded “‘He has no interest, this is so embarrassing.” It turns out she thought this was a date and left thinking “Ok, no chemistry” and “maybe he’s gay.” Fallon blushed the entire time she told this story, and the audience laughed at his discomfort. Eventually, he salvaged things, saying “I am in shock right now…I can’t believe I dated Nicole Kidman. This is fantastic.”
Ariana Grande’s killer musical impressions
For better or for worse, The Tonight Show has plenty of games and other interactive bits for its guests. One of the most popular is the Wheel of Musical Impressions. The gimmick is simple: when Fallon has musical guests on, he challenges them to imitate the singing style of randomly selected celebrities. When Ariana Grande appeared on the show in 2015, she was handed a series of different female celebs and challenged to sing songs in their seemingly inimitable styles.
It turns out, though, that nothing is inimitable when you’re as talented as Ariana Grande. She managed to successfully sing “The Wheels on the Bus” in the style of Christina Aguilera and “Can’t Feel My Face” in the style of Celine Dion. Heck, she even managed to sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” exactly like Britney Spears!
As far as musical impressions go, Grande wasn’t just good…she might well be the best who ever did it.
Jimmy Fallon interviews a ‘Game of Thrones’ legend
It’s not uncommon for Jimmy Fallon to interview celebs from popular TV shows like Game of Thrones. However, our favorite Tonight Show bit of all time involved him interviewing Daenerys Targaryen. No, we’re not talking about Emilia Clarke, the actor who played this character in the show. We’re talking about the character herself, who was played by Kristen Wiig wearing a dragon on her shoulder and sporting a platinum wig (or should that be “platinum wiig?”).
Both Fallon and Wiig had acted alongside each other for a long time back on Saturday Night Live. They are both talented improvisers who keep managing to crack each other up with each other’s bizarre jokes. By the time Wiig claimed that her dragon was named “Carl,” we had fallen out of our seats in laughter!