In one of the more caustic SNL impersonations of all time, Jimmy Fallon handled MTV’s Carson Daly, once long ago. His take on Daly, at the time, struck me as a little ham-handed and excessively brash, as he even assigned to him the words “I’m Carson Daly and I’m a massive tool” [1] [2]. Unfortunately, in light of recently viewing Daly’s Total Request Live interview with Eminem from 2000, I have no choice but to give a nod to Fallon’s bit as a necessary critical maneuver.
Total Request Live is actually a show for which I generally have pretty fond feelings: I associate it with its burgeoning days, that is, when it was likely to show videos as artistically stalwart as The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Perfect” and Matchbox 20’s “Real World.” Then, in my opinion, the boy bands and Britney Spears ruined it, but it wasn’t necessarily a congenitally flawed enterprise.
It can certainly veer toward the “sanguine,” however, as opposed to, say, “artistically substantial.” Eminem’s 2000 visit, which I recently viewed on some Facebook YouTube link, was an egregious example of this tendency toward representing a sort of football player/cheerleader “coolness” most people outgrow in 10th grade or so.
On the episode with Eminem, they for some odd reason saw fit to explore the topic of who was the “worst guest ever” on TRL, in Daly’s opinion. Daly chose Liam Gallagher of Oasis [3], whom he then bizarrely described as “unpredictable” [4], as if that’s a sure-fire annihilation of his skill as an interviewee [5], and, after showing the clip, oversaw Eminem making fun of Gallagher’s annoying accent. It was like watching two high schoolers, basically, who have no coneption of music and don’t care about it, mocking someone they consider a “dork” on the chess team, when such a person likely has way better chance to succeed in life than they, themselves, do. And although Eminem and Daly are obviously two successful people, and, I believe, pretty well beholden to a sufficient amount of merit in what they do in their everyday lives, they made me ashamed to be an American on this particular episode of TRL.
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[1] This exact outburst came at the very end of the Daly-impersonating skit, in the innards of which Fallon had quipped “I’m Carson Daly and I’m completely average in every way.”
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[2] In my own way I kind of have a checkered past with Fallon himself: actually we’d pretty much thought of him as a “massive tool” when we first saw him on SNL, myself later warming up to him for his overall skit genus, his part in Drew Barrymore’s Whip it, and, certainly, what’s finally my appreciation for his appalled disposition before MTV’s Daly.
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[3] Give Gallagher further credit for being the only member of Oasis probably docile enough to go on the show of what the other members figured to be a bunch of wankers.
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[4] The situation is exacerbated by the fact that Gallagher pretty much didn’t even exhibit any “unpredictable” behavior, and what’s more answered all of Daly’s questions in a pretty forthright sort of manner.
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[5] Last time I checked, “unpredictable” behavior makes for more entertaining television than “predictable.”
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