Entertainer Of The Year

For most people, meeting Barbra Streisand would be the highlight of their year. If, somehow, you were permitted to sing with her, it would win the decade. But to duet with Babs in front of a national television audience? That would be an unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime event—unless you’re Jimmy Fallon. “People on the street are like, ‘Dude—you were with Barbra,’ ” he says. “ ‘Barbra! That’s fantastic!’ And I’m like, ‘Really? Did we do that? That’s amazing, but…when was that, even?’ ”

It happened this past September on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, marking an end to Streisand’s 50-plus-year absence from the program. But even here in his office at 30 Rock in Manhattan, Fallon admits he has a hard time keeping track of 2014. “I don’t ever really know what I’m doing until we have some time off or someone asks about it. They’ll say, ‘You did a sketch with Carol Burnett on The Tonight Show.’ And I’ll be like, ‘I did? That’s right—I totally did that!’ ”

Fallon totally did a lot of things during his first year as host of The Tonight Show. To start: He sang karaoke with Emma Stone, did the Stanky Legg with Will Smith, landed a song with will.i.am on the Hot 100 chart, staged a drum-off between Will Ferrell and a Red Hot Chili Pepper, and exposed Daniel Radcliffe as a skilled rapper. All that’s just from the first page of The Tonight Show’s most popular YouTube videos, where each clip has at least 10 million views; the highest, “Lip Sync Battle with Emma Stone,” is at 36 million and counting. Stone famously won that battle, but Fallon won the war. Since this time last year, The Tonight Show has exploded from 514,000 to 1.8 million Twitter followers; on Facebook, it went from 765,000 to 4 million followers; and on YouTube, it rose from 1.5 million to 5.2 million subscribers. That’s enough to eclipse every other late-night host from Jimmy Kimmel to David Letterman. Thanks to Fallon, The Tonight Show has gone viral.

Meanwhile, The Tonight Show proper—the version that the National Broadcasting Company airs every weeknight after your local news—is not only No. 1 in late-night, it’s also up in the ratings. Yes, up, as in higher than it was in Jay Leno’s hands the year before. Which is all backward: When the 40-year-old Fallon took over in February, Leno’s graying viewership was supposed to bolt at the sight of this new kid, and the young audience Fallon had courted during his Late Night years was supposed to be too busy Snapchatting to sit in front of a TV. “The ratings are almost, like, double,” says Fallon, full of pride if not math. Among the all-­important 18–49 demo, average viewership is 31 percent higher, a trajectory that happens only if you’re the NFL, a zombie, or Shonda Rhimes.

“The Kardashian thing I’m kind of sick of,” Fallon says to no one inparticular. “It blew up real quick,but it didn’t really break the Internet. The Internet still works.”

He and his head writers are sitting around a table in Fallon’s office, where they assemble every morning for the daily creative meeting. It’s Thursday, and they’re going through packets of potential jokes for tonight’s monologue, tomorrow’s Thank You Notes and NFL Superlatives, and next week’s Hashtags. Punchlines about Kim Kardashian’s Paper magazine cover, which hit the Internet one full day ago, are starting to wear out the room.

So Fallon moves on: “There’s a board game for kids called Gooey Louie, where you pull boogers out of his nose. If you pull the wrong booger, his brain flies out.” The table bursts into laughter. Producer Gavin Purcell pulls up the ad on his laptop and plays it on one of the two giant TVs hanging in the office. It’s as ridiculous as they’d hoped—and perfect ­fodder for one of the goofy games that have become the show’s main attraction. “Like, how does Channing Tatum play Pictionary?” Fallon asks. “How could you see that, unless you hang out with Channing Tatum at his house?”

More games mean less time for guest interviews, which happens to work to Fallon’s advantage. Critics have cited his interview style—too complimentary, even fanboyish—as a weakness. Fallon himself admits there are still improvements to be made (“I could always be better at interviewing,” he says), but he points out how much he’s grown since he started on Late Night in 2009. “I’d rush through everything. I’d talk to De Niro and just run through everything. I’d be sweating. They’d tell me to stretch, because we didn’t fill up enough time.... But I just kept getting better at talking to guests, and not worrying about time. After five years of doing Late Night, you just get better.”

If Fallon is no Dick Cavett, the show might be better for it. The traditional chat-on-a-couch format was forged at a time when hosts didn’t have to compete with the Internet, videogames, or Breaking Bad on Netflix. “If you watch old interviews on talk shows from 30 years ago, they can be more meandering,” says showrunner Josh Lieb. “Maybe more boring, even. We can’t afford those boring minutes.”

Celebrity guests on The Tonight Show have followed suit by agreeing to high jinks that would normally be swatted down by a phalanx of publicists. Bradley Cooper smashed eggs on his own face, while Glenn Close competed in a pie-eating contest. The segments give A-list stars a platform to prove that they can have fun, maybe even be relatable. Best-case scenario: A clip of their antics goes viral, earning them endless free publicity for whatever project they’re promoting. Worst-case: They’re just another in a long line of celebrities looking silly on the show. Regardless, they have the comfort of knowing that Jimmy Fallon is on their side. “We’ve set up an environment here where he has the trust of guests, where they’ll come in to do these crazy things,” Purcell says. “That’s the secret to the virality of our show—-that, and we happen to tape five hours of television every week.”

To keep things feeling fresh, the staff likes to rotate the games as much as possible, and also invent new ones. “We’ll spend a meeting going through weeks of celebrities coming up and figuring out what to do with them,” Fallon says.

Landing on a bit is only part of it—they have to make sure it works, too. The R&D phase varies. “Face Balls, that was something we did in the office as a joke,” explains Fallon. “You sit in two chairs with a beach ball, and you just throw it as hard as you can. No one’s getting hurt, but it’s so stupid and funny to watch.” Then there’s the trickier matter of getting a celebrity to agree to it. In the case of Face Balls, the team wasn’t sure if anyone would sign on, so they kept pitching it. “Julia Roberts was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do something!’ We pitched her 10 ideas, and one of them was Face Balls. She was like, ‘Done—Face Balls.’ We were like, ‘You sure? Of all the ones we pitched, you wanna do Face Balls?’ And she says, ‘Totally, let’s do it. It’s never been done. I wanna see if it’s fun.’ ”

It’s a warm late-November evening, and NBC is having Jimmy Fallon do some manual labor. He’s outside 30 Rock’s Sixth Avenue entrance holding the giant electrical plug that will light up The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’s very own marquee.

NBC doesn’t make a habit of handing out marquees, so a lot of people have come to share the moment with Fallon: his staff, family members, network brass, and (behind barricades) a large crowd of fans on the street. They all cheer him on as he plugs it in, and once it’s lit—his name in blue neon—Fallon poses for pictures, first with Lorne Michaels, who executive-produces the show, and then with his parents.

“This is definitely the most exciting year of my life,” Fallon says later. He’s not just talking about The Tonight Show: He and his wife, Nancy, are also busy raising their 16-month-old daughter, Winnie. “The baby and the show are both starting and growing. It’s interesting to raise both of them.” Sometimes he manages to multitask. “In the morning, when my wife watches the show—we can’t stay up that late—the baby will see me and yell, ‘Dada!’ She’s really becoming a comedy nerd. She’ll know all the members of Monty Python before she’s 2.” The family man even bought a truck, which he keeps at his house in the Hamptons. “I cruise around in that thing, play country music. Makes me feel like a man. I think I’m going to start wearing cologne.”