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For all of us who cut our late-night TV habits watching The Tonight Show, it’s been fascinating to witness the evolution from Johnny Carson to Jimmy Fallon, who celebrated a decade as the host of the hallmark NBC show (after a stint on Late Night). The comedian has been a fixture on the network since joining Saturday Night Live in 1998, and NBC is celebrating his first 10 years as the Tonight Show host with a two-hour prime time “best of” special on May 14 at 9 p.m. Get ready for all the fun with our roundup of Fallon’s finest hosting moments from Late Night and The Tonight Show.
Jimmy, the Roots and Mariah Carey perform “All I Want for Christmas Is You” with classroom instruments (2012)
Don’t tell Paul Shaffer, 74, but Jimmy Fallon is blessed with perhaps the best house band in late-night history: Philly hip-hop legends The Roots. In 2012, Fallon and the crew launched a new recurring series — similar to NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts — in which they joined Carly Rae Jepsen to perform her catchy single “Call Me Maybe,” accompanied by classroom instruments like triangles, toy xylophones, kazoos and ukuleles. Over the years, they’ve teamed up with everyone from Adele and Madonna, 65, to Ringo Starr, 83, Metallica and even the Muppets. But the form may have reached its peak in December 2012 when Mariah Carey, 55, belted out her holiday megahit alongside Jimmy, the sweater-clad band and a quartet of precocious kids in front of a roaring (fake) fire.
Emma Stone destroys Jimmy in a high-stakes lip sync battle (2014)
Fallon faced off against future two-time-Oscar-winner Emma Stone in a lip sync battle segment, in which she tackled Blues Traveler’s “Hook” and DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win” — two excellent choices if you want to show off a preternatural dexterity around lightning-fast lyrics and rap verses. The audience screamed along, and Jimmy knew he was toast, but he looked positively giddy as she hammed it up. When she finished, he shouted, “Come on! That was the best one that’s ever been done on the show!”
The Jimmys switch places for April Fools’ Day (2022)
A defining part of this era of late-night shows is that the hosts all seem to genuinely like each other, with a cross-network camaraderie replacing decades of fierce competition and animosity. Last year, Fallon partnered with Jimmy Kimmel, 56, Seth Meyers, 50, John Oliver and Stephen Colbert, 60, for a podcast called Strike Force Five to support their out-of-work staff during the writers strike. But it wasn’t the first time they had worked together: In April 2022, Fallon and Kimmel pulled off an elaborate prank in which they showed up at each others’ studios across the country and surprised the live audiences. “Hi, I’m Jimmy,” Fallon said as the crowd went wild. “Please, please, settle down, you’re gonna offend the other Jimmy!”
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