Nothing is more reliable in late-night television than waiting until the championship level of a sport to start making fun of its major players. Sure, the human interest stories are always there, but The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, like so many other shows of its ilk, has just come around to the notion that, hey, the NBA Finals have been going on for nearly a week! Let’s mine them for some cheap jokes!
Fallon’s “Pros and Cons” bit bears a striking resemblance to Letterman’s classic Top 10 routine, but we’ll let it slide — there are only so many notes on a piano, as the saying goes. We’ll also let slide the easy jokes about LeBron James carrying his team, because Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving have been abysmal (even if LeBron has his own problems). But what we can’t abide is this sort of aggressively lazy joke structuring:
Jimmy, buddy, do you even know what a “con” is? It’s not just a punchline, it’s supposed to have some negative properties, too. Unless someone can explain to me why this makes sense – IN DETAIL – I will continue to insist it doesn’t. Fallon has had some really good bits, and is in general a charming performer, but why is this even a structured bit rather than part of his monologue? Seriously, just remove all the formatting from this joke, read the words aloud and it’s funnier:
Also, it’s so very mean to say that Cleveland losing two games to nothing in the series is a “pro.” But hey, they had to shoehorn the joke into their format somehow.
