By now, it’s highly probable you’ve seen the clip of Jimmy Fallon tousling Donald Trump’s hair during the Republican presidential nominee’s latest appearance on The Tonight Show.
It’s also quite likely you’ve witnessed some of the backlash to that segment: one social media analytics firm reckons negative mentions of The Tonight Show on Twitter spiked over 2,300% from normal levels after that golden birds’ nest was rustled.
Writers, comedians, commentators and plain ol’ folk derided the host for his gentle, playful, and quasi-affectionate treatment of a man who has spent an entire campaign shitting on minorities, the family of a fallen U.S. soldier, and common decency itself.
Trump: Savage dark-skinned illegals, roaming the streets in search of murder and mayhem
Fallon: What? WHAT? Haha, wow!
— ?netw3rk (@netw3rk) September 16, 2016
Still, the segment wasn’t just uncomfortable to watch, it was also kinda concerning. In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, author and historian Rudolph Herzog – who wrote a book about the use of humour in Nazi Germany – said “there’s something so wrong” about the softball approach Fallon took.
“It seemed a bit like Fallon was sucking up to him a bit. That’s how it came across.”
While he definitely didn’t make any full-blown comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler, Herzog said when a comedian has “the airtime, that’s the moment to find a really intelligent and funny way to tear off the mask.” That’s a task he believes Fallon didn’t accomplish, ’cause “it’s not about his hair.
That endears people to the man, because people like individuals who have faults.”
Herzog did compare Fallon’s humanising teasing and the comedic parlance more broadly used to describe Trump to the humour exhibited during Hitler’s rise, saying “a lot of people were laughing, literally, before he took power.
He seemed such a ridiculous person with his little mustache. A lot of people in the establishment thought he was miserable. And then also the stuff he wrote in his book all seemed so absurd…Then Hitler actually did what he wrote in his book.”
Look, Herzog did go ahead and say “comparisons to Hitler are very, very problematic” due to his “singular” impact on the world, “but there is stuff to take away from Hitler’s rise to power any time you’re dealing with a demagogue.”
While nobody could accuse Jimmy Fallon of being America’s most scathing comic – far from it, tbh – comments like those from Herzog might just be enough for the media to pivot on how much it allows Trump to get away with.
Read the whole interview here, before Fallon interviews Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on Monday. Watch this space.
