Earlier today (9.7) Rolling Stone’s Krystie Lee Yandoli posted an extensively-sourced torpedo piece about The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon. It describes the 48 year old host and comedian as something of a neurotic, erratic, hair–trigger type, and the show’s general atmosphere being on the stressed, unsettled, far–from–serene side.
Yandoli assembled the story from chats with 16 Tonight Show employees — two currently working there and 14 ex-staffers.
Secondly, we’re all familiar with this unfortunate syndrome, which for the time being we’ll call the Jimmy Fallon syndrome. Over the decades more than a few powerhouse comedic stars of hugely popular TV shows have, to varying degrees, tended to be difficult, turbulent bosses who have caused staffers to kvetch and suffer and briefly contemplate suicide. I’m sorry for the employees who’ve had to deal with the erratic whims and occasional outbursts that are par for the course when you work for intense, half-crazy, highly demanding types like Fallon, but the complaints in Yandoli’s article don’t represent a one-off — they represent a well-established pattern of abusive behavior that probably reaches back to the eras of George M. Cohan, P.T. Barnum, Edwin Booth and, quite possibly, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
I’m presuming that similar discomfort was felt decades ago by staffers who worked under Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson (although not Steve Allen, reportedly a more mild-mannered type than the others).
Similar vibes have also emanated, of course, from staffers who’ve worked for Ellen DeGeneres, James Corden, David Letterman, et. al. I don’t know about Jimmy Kimmel workplace vibes.
It does seem to go with the territory, Not always but often.
HE comment posted during Ellen DeGeneres brouhaha:
