Jimmy Fallon’s NYC Blackout Monologue Lights Up Televisions
For five hours on Saturday, the island of Manhattan went dark, but Sagaponack funnyman Jimmy Fallon managed to make light of the situation, getting big laughs for his take on the citywide blackout during his opening monologue on Monday’s episode of The Tonight Show.
While the outage caused approximately 72,000 people to lose power in NYC, Fallon’s jokes about reached approximately 2.66 million viewers across the country. It is not clear whether Fallon was personally affected by the blackout, as he may have wisely spent the weekend at his retreat out East. He was however, kind enough to update all the weekend Hamptonites about the goings-on back in the city, explaining, “For hours New Yorkers were trapped on subways, traffic was at a standstill and there was no air conditioning at the Port Authority. Then the blackout hit.”
New Yorkers did what the always do—helped each other, even if tourists only seem to see the grouchy side. As Fallon continued his monologue, he showed a video with several people attempting, pretty poorly, to stand in as traffic lights and direct cars on some of the world’s busiest streets. The comic keenly noted, “That’s exactly what you want. Five strangers pointing in different directions at the same time.”
Con Edison did not initially believe the 13,000-volt cable burnt out at West 64th Street and West End Avenue played a role in the blackout, but now they say otherwise. This comes exactly 42 years after the two-day blackout of 1977 which darkened, with the exception of Rockaway and the Pratt Institute campus, the entire city. ConEd president Timothy Crawley claimed the cascading series of system failures was extremely unique and he is “very confident” the city would not see a recurrence. Perhaps it will take another 42 years for that claim to prove incorrect, but with the city’s subway growing more decrepit by the day, and the mayor out campaigning for the presidency, the wait may be shorter.
It would seem that Fallon has fully recovered from what he called a crazy weekend in New York City, even enjoying a Jennifer Lopez It’s My Party Tour concert at Madison Square Garden on Monday. Those who had tickets for Lopez’s Saturday show were not so lucky.