Tattooed with an awkward, nervous grin and a shuffling, insecurity-reeking delivery, Jimmy Fallon absorbs criticism like a sea sponge, turning any detractor into a 300-pound bully picking on a 5-year-old girl on crutches.
And while singing Halloween jingles in the key of Dave Matthews normally leads elsewhere than iconic canonization, Fallon has engineered a coup in the hearts of adolescents, offering amusingly pleasant humor to be taken as gospel.
Jimmy Fallon: Average Underachieving Comedian has thus exploited his Oh-Gee cuteness and pop culture panache to metamorphic heights, developing into Jimmy Fallon: Comedic Future, who ubiquitously flouts his shtick on a TV terrain with borders ranging from the Weekend Update to an MTV circus while remaining nearly critic proof.
Now, as follows in the Comedic Future trajectory, Fallon delivers his obligatory amalgamation of musical fluff and stand-up with "The Bathroom Wall," an album that succinctly mirrors the essence of Fallon's career: mildly delightful but utterly toothless.
Fallon's underdog appeal crowned him antihero for college audiences before his first "Nomar" cry, and his live routine overtly aims to appease that cult following through commentary on the college experiences. He taps into the safe collective memory of dorm life, roommates, RAs and fake IDs and achieves minor laughs without delving into anything riskier than loofa gags.
As past Comedic Futures from Pryor to Leary, even Rock, have proved, stand-up can't cower to the audience's comfort; it must penetrate uncomfortable areas where comedy wasn't thought to inhabit, and Fallon's modest tepidness can't comprehend this, instead imitating Jerry Seinfeld both in commonplace observations and vocal delivery. Seinfeld, however, unloaded 20 years of material on his one album "I'm Telling You for the Last Time," unlike Fallon who seems to have expediently garnered whatever anodyne material he hadn't already donated to SNL.
His inadvertent Seinfeld mimicry aside, Fallon does possess a startling ability for impersonations; if only he had an appropriate outlet for it on the album. Beginning his routine, he unloads a bombardment of impressions including John Travolta, Adam Sandler and Robin Williams in the context of auditioning to be spokesman for a troll doll, a gimmick at once amusing and perplexing in its random, seemingly strained creation.
The auditions continue later when Fallon picks up a guitar to perform troll doll jingles in the vein of his SNL holiday songs. Unsurprisingly, he performs his parodies impeccably (Dave Matthews, Michael Stipe, etc.), but an underscoring realization that these concepts are hastily conceived permeates, preventing them from accelerating past the level of pleasantness of SNL, where most of the underdeveloped stand-up should have resided.
The validity of "The Bathroom Wall" thus falls on its five musical attempts.
Instead of trying to find a voice or style of his own, Fallon opts to burlesque different styles native to the 1980s: cheesy R&B mush ("Idiot Boyfriend"), Beastie Boys electro-funk ("(I Can't Play) Basketball"), gooey molasses country blues ("Drinking in the Woods") and ballistic British punk ("Road Rage," "Snowball").
The inverse of Fallon's stand-up, the remarkable aspect of these songs lies in the blaring amount of time and effort poured into generating these studio slick, overproduced songs with such sophomoric underpinnings. Both "Road Rage" and "Snowball" can't decide whether to take themselves seriously or humorously, instead falling into the rut of complacency, while "(I Can't Play) Basketball" expends all the humor of a Raffi song.
At least "Idiot Boyfriend" revels in its absolute wretchedness to produce the album's only truly realized moment, one that has both bizarre lyrical snap and tacky accompaniment without overly depending on Fallon's innate charm.
As for the rest of "The Bathroom Wall," nothing veers toward offensively bad territory, but nothing strikes a strong comedic cord, instead leaving a bland, unfulfilled potential for our Comedic Future, no matter how adorable it may be.
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