According to a new study, Jimmy Fallon spends less time talking than anyone else in late night television.
The study was conducted by Stephen Winzenburg, a communications professor at Grand View University, and shows that Fallon spends only 37% of the time “talking” to his guests on his show. That is far less than Jay Leno or Johnny Carson.
Fallon spends about 21 percent of his time on his monologue (not considered “talk”), just as Leno did, but Fallon spends 23 percent on comedy bits and 14 percent on music, both significantly higher than what Leno was doing as host of the show.
With 37 percent of his show dedicated to talk, Fallon is way below his peers. Craig Ferguson is next lowest at 43 percent; Jimmy Kimmel is at 48 percent; Seth Meyers and David Letterman are each at 51 percent; and Conan O’Brien is at 53 percent. [via]
Winzenberg argues that Jimmy Fallon does not have great interviewing skills and instead uses his Saturday Night Live background to make the show work.
“Fallon may have made the changes to downplay his weak interviewing skills and better utilize his Saturday Night Live background. But he also abandoned the edgy political humor of prior Tonight hosts in favor of song parodies and celebrity beer pong.” … “His relatively small amount of talk time is closer to that used by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert…. The Tonight Show has become successful by looking more like a comedy variety series than a traditional talk show.”
And this entire time, I thought silence was golden.
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