Rolling Stone published an article today about Jimmy Fallon and the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, which actually Jimmy had rechristened the Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, and basically about what a difficult person Jimmy is and how miserable it is to work on that show.

And it got me thinking about some late night thoughts.

Not thoughts that I’ve had at late night, but thoughts that I’ve had about late night.

You get it.

So it got me thinking about late night talk shows.

I love late night talk shows.

I love the monologue.

I love the interviews.

I certainly like these shows were more fun years ago, right?

Like there’s a lot of love for Johnny Carson.

I don’t have to pour on Johnny Carson love, but he was happy to have guests who had nothing to promote where now these are mostly promotional vehicles, a little bit different, right?

Well, if they were on right now, which they’re not because of the writer’s strike, then there’d be fewer things to promote since actors currently aren’t promoting their projects because of the actor strikes.

But anyway, they’re mostly about promoting stuff, but they’re still fun, right?

And I long wanted to write for a late night show that would include Tonight Show and Conan and Letterman and SNL, all of them.

I wanted to write for those shows.

And my senior year of college, I think it was my sister Abby who first planted the seed in my head of doing this.

But I decided I was going to send monologue joke ideas to Jay Leno every day in the spirit of encouraging him to want to hire me.

Now, I’m not a huge Jay Leno fan.

In fact, I do not like Jay Leno.

At the time, I disliked him less and still it would be a good job, right?

So this was post the anthrax scare of late 2001, early 2002.

So I decided to send postcards where you couldn’t be scared of them.

And on one side, I would write my joke suggestions for the previous day’s monologue.

Hey, here were other jokes you could have added to last night’s monologue.

And on the other side, it just had my name, Lex, in giant letters along with contact information for me.

And I would do this five days a week.

I would send Jay Leno postcards with ideas of jokes.

And it went to dead silence, but I kept doing it.

And a couple months into this process, I got home from class that day to my off-campus housing and there was a message on my answering machine because that’s how long ago it was.

And the message was from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno with not starring.

He had removed the starring that had been part of the show’s title for a long time.

The one that, you know, Jimmy put back.

But anyway, I had this voicemail and it said to please call them back, which I did.

Pretty excitedly.

They’re like, hey, we’re not allowed to take unsolicited joke suggestions.

I’m like, oh, no, no, I understand.

And I’m not like, I’m not trying to get those jokes on the show per se.

I’m simply kind of using these as my application.

I’d love to come write for Jay.

And the response is, well, you know, Jay’s had the same writing team for a long time and there’s absolutely no turnover.

And I was like, okay.

And so I stopped sending him those postcards.

Then Jimmy Fallon got The Late Night Show when Conan took over The Tonight Show, which as you know, ended well for everyone.

But so Jimmy Fallon, who was known and I suppose beloved from his time on Saturday Night Live, was taking over The Late Night Show.

And so I started a blog, which was much easier than sending postcards that was called hiremejimmyfallon.com.

And it was a WordPress site.

And each day I would write monologue jokes that he could have included in the previous night’s monologue, with the idea being he should hire me.

I think even before the show started, before he started doing it, I was putting up monologue jokes on that site each day, and then I continued doing it once he was underway.

And I would Tivo the show each night, because I’m not going to stay up late enough to watch that.

But I would Tivo it, watch his jokes, and then come up with some others.

And the point wasn’t, hey, you know, your jokes weren’t good enough.

It was just, hey, here’s some other joke ideas.

And I got a tiny bit of press attention from it, but, and occasionally I would get a tweet from writers for The Tonight, or from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, but I never got any actual traction.

Certainly, neither Jimmy nor anyone involved with hiring writers ever contacted me there.

I’m not saying that that quality makes Jimmy a jerk.

In fact, it does not.

It’s not the typical way one gets a writing job in Hollywood, although it’s not impossible.

Look at the Shit My Dad Says Twitter account.

That guy got a TV show.

It bombed, but it had William Shatner on it.

But anyway, I don’t know.

I think that Jimmy Fallon demonstrates some level of smarm that detracts from his charm that shows that there’s some low-key ego slash evil issues going on there.

No, no, no.

That’s my take.

And apparently all of his staff agrees, based on Denny’s Rolling Stone piece.

But yeah, I never got hired by any of those late night shows.

So, oh well.

Their loss?

My loss?

Everybody’s loss.

I think the whole world has suffered because of that.

But it’s okay.

What are you going to do?

At least now I get to do this instead.