If you ever watched Jimmy Fallon perform in a Saturday Night Live sketch during his tenure on the show, there’s a pretty good chance you also saw him break character and laugh during it. His reputation for doing so is well-known, and long. (Tracy Morgan apparently really hated it; “I told him not to do that shit in my sketches, so he never did,” he said in 2007, per Vulture.) Fallon is in the background of two of the most famous sketches of the 2000s—“More Cowbell” and “Debbie Downer”—and he’s breaking in both of them.
Fallon is well aware of this reputation, and he addressed it a bit during his appearance today on Hot Ones. “Christopher Walken wasn’t even talking like a human being, he was doing like an impression of himself,” the late night host recalled while eating hot wings. “The room got hot and it shook. I remember I had one line and right as I’m about to give my line, [Chris] Kattan and Will [Ferrell] improvised and pushed each other. Kattan knocked Will’s sunglasses off and I could see the eyes of a lunatic. And I started laughing. That’s what got my reputation as the guy who laughs during all the sketches.”
As for “Debbie Downer,” Fallon maintains that he “was really solid until the way, way, way end,” which is not exactly true when you watch the clip, but whatever. In that sketch, Fallon definitely wasn’t the worst offender. “We all broke in the scene, and Fred Armisen’s in the scene,” he recalls. “The next day in the New York Post, they put a picture of us and Fred was the only one laughing in the photo. I remember going up to him and going, ‘How unprofessional. Keep it together, buddy.’” And Jimmy gets away with it again.
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