Just a disclaimer, this is not a slam on Jimmy Fallon who seems a decent enough person off-screen. He is the King of the Fake Laugh though, which perhaps is part of the job description. Can you pretend to find something humorous? Are you good at faking it?

He is not good at faking it.

This isn’t about Jimmy Fallon though. It’s about the fake laugh. There is no sound more horrifying in the entire world than the fake laugh. You can be sitting across from your dearest friend, or the person you care for more than anything in the world, and if you hear the fake laugh, you know that one or both of you is an utter fraud.

You cannot un-hear the fake laugh and you know that any connection that you thought you had the moment before was probably never there at all. Is this a harsh judgment? Experience tells me otherwise. Watch the video and tell me differently.

You are not a talk show host. You are not a talk show guest. You don’t have to present one way or the other. Just be real.

I don’t even know what spurred me to comment on this. I don’t know exactly anyway. It was a deja vu moment. It was a cruel echo, maybe from one of those moments that should have been red-flagged as false. Nothing really specific. Just one of those someone just walked across my grave chills that happens sometimes.