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.