Current Affairs: The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon.

It begins:

There is a distinctive, deeply uncanny horror to the way Jimmy Fallon laughs. Look it up—there are literally hundreds of videos showing him breaking out into laughter at the slightest provocation. It is not a reaction (he sometimes won’t even wait for his guest to get to their carefully scripted punchline). Rather, it is a performance, a sudden, corporeal convulsion.

Fallon leans in his chair, as if pressed back by some unseen force. It’s accompanied by the ritualistic slapping of the desk, a sound that echoes like a gavel in a courtroom. Watching the Tonight Show in the deep hours of the night, beaming out from a phone screen or laptop, there’s an unshakeable impression that this is not really entertainment but a desperate kind of ritual.

Fallon acts as the high priest of a terrified optimism, his rictus grin serving as a shield against the encroaching silence of the real. Here, in the sanitized, over-lit heart of the American culture industry, there is an inescapable horror. But it isn’t a monster lurking in the shadows; it is the manic, unblinking insistence that actually, there are no shadows at all. If the Gothic tradition of fear teaches us that the ruins of the past haunt the present, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon offers the inverse: a present so forcefully flattened, so aggressively “fun,” that it has exorcised history entirely, leaving us trapped in a sterile, eternal loop of viral games and celebrity lip-syncing while the world slides into climate collapse and fascist politics.

Add to this the rather well-known information about Fallon running a miserable workspace, and you get a very dark portrait of the current state of a formerly sacred late night institution.

By now most people who read Heathen are, I’m sure, aware of the SNL trio Please Don’t Destroy, which is comprised of Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy. They make jokes about the fact that Higgins and Herlihy are SNL legacies.

Higgins’ father is Steve Higgins, now the longtime announcer on Fallon’s Tonight Show, but previously a writer on SNL. Higgins also cameoed in a Timberlake monologue years ago as an obsessed fan there at the expense of his daughter, which was super funny.

Herlihy’s father is Tim Herlihy, a longtime collaborator of Adam Sandler and former writer-producer on the show. Sandler sketches have sometimes referenced “that Herlihy boy” as an in-joke, which at this point is hilariously ambiguous.

Ben Marshall, though, is just a regular guy as noted in this PDD skit with Dakota Johnson about nepo babies.

So, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the SNL kids would’ve known each other for years… and yet NO. In fact, it was Marshall who introduced them to each other when all 3 were at NYU:

The trio met on the NYU comedy scene in 2017; Marshall and Herlihy were enrolled there as film students, while Higgins majored in acting and English. It was Marshall who first introduced Herlihy to Higgins, sensing the two shared a comic sensibility. Unbeknownst to him, they shared more than that — both Herlihy and Higgins are the sons of SNL writing legends.

How’d it come up? Like was it, “oh, what’s your dad do?” “Oh, he worked at SNL” “NO WAY!”