"I'm going to do some celebrity impressions." Talk about your low-key, understated introductions! That's how Jimmy Fallon's 1998 audition for "Saturday Night Live" kicked off, with a statement that doesn't even come close to describing the following eight minutes of Fallon hilariously hitting the nail on the head again and again.
Back in 1998, Fallon was just another rising comic, but the future "Late Night" host and Slow Jammer clearly knew his craft and his strengths. He started off with a "celebrity walk-a-thon" with John Travolta, Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, then segued into original characters like "Double Take Guy" and "Wannabe Composer."
About six minutes into the audition, once he got the expected stuff out of the way, Fallon hit his stride by picking up a guitar, noting, "I also do a lot of musical impressions, but I'm going to make them short for you." Short they may have been, but they were also some of the funniest stuff he did. He slid from U2's Bono gasping at the start of "Desire" to The Cure ("My tears are like hydrochloric acid, it burns my face") to The Wallflowers ("Everybody knows that I'm Bob Dylan's son; that's how I got to open for the Stones") and Alanis Morissette ("My voice is annoying; my video's boring").
The "SNL" bigwigs clearly agreed they had something special with Fallon, and he was hired to work on the 1998-99 season.
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