ITK Q&A: Fox News late-night host Jimmy Failla on aiming for bipartisan laughs, his ‘performative anger’ pet peeve and his surprising pick for funniest politician

As the new host of “Fox News Saturday Night,” Jimmy Failla says it’s important to him to “lower the temperature in our political discourse.”

“I genuinely feel like comedy is failing the country right now, because it’s supposed to be common culture, meaning a place where you can put your differences aside and just laugh at the absurdities of life,” said Failla.

But in the last half-decade or so, according to the 47-year-old comedian, much of the late-night landscape has become “activism masquerading as comedy, and I absolutely just don’t want that for our medium.”

The New York-born comic spent more than five years as a full-time cab driver starting in 2007 before a booker for Fox News saw one of his stand-up gigs. The first time he appeared on the network, he recalled, “I had a cab double-parked outside on Sixth Avenue with the trunk open so the cops thought I was running into get something heavy and I wouldn’t get a parking ticket. And I went in and did [a] hit on Kennedy’s Fox Business show, and then came back down and took somebody to LaGuardia.”

The author of The New York Times bestselling book “Cancel Culture Dictionary: An A to Z Guide to Winning the War on Fun” was named the host of “Fox News Saturday Night” in January.

He sees his late-night platform as a sort of “autonomous zone.”

“You know they have that space between North Korea and South Korea where there’s no guns and nobody attacks each other? We’re essentially trying to do that for an hour on Saturday night. We’re like a cable news [Demilitarized Zone],” he said.

Failla said he doesn’t want to only “shoot at half the targets,” adding, “I want liberals to enjoy the TV show.”

“I’m trying to be a bug light — just an actual bug light — for cool people that are just sick of like the partisan pugilism,” the father of one said.

“Comedy doesn’t have a political party — comedy is a party. And if you do it right, and you’re genuinely telling jokes in good faith, the whole world should be able to gravitate towards what you do,” Failla said.

We wanted to know more about the cab driver-turned comedian who’s aiming for bipartisan laughs, so we asked him to answer these questions.

Hometown: Levittown, N.Y.

College attended: Nassau Community College

What did you want to be when you were a kid? This. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Pascana, made me stay up late and watch “The Tonight Show.” She told me to watch it one night [and] she said, “Because I’m telling you have like a vibe where I could totally see you doing this someday.”

Now she might have just felt bad because she saw my report cards and realized that didn’t have a lot of lanes in life. But I believed her. Like from fifth grade to the day they said I had my own show, I sociopathically believed this woman through seven years of driving 84 hours a week in a taxi, I genuinely believed.

So if Mrs. Pascana is out there, I probably owe her some royalties.

Favorite hobby: Smoking cigars — which I know I shouldn’t say, the youth is listening.

In my backyard on Long Island, when the weather warms up, every Sunday I host a pretty funky get-together of cable news faces that would be super familiar to the American public, that actually just come over, and smoke a cigar and just kind of talk about the world.

Between you, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, are there too many late-night hosts named Jimmy? According to Jimmy Fallon, no, because he sent me a really nice note and a care package when I got this show. And he said it starts with the name.

Did you ever consider going by James? You want to know what the problem is? James is my legal name on my taxi license. James sounds like you’re driving something fancier than a yellow cab. It sounds like I’m driving like a family — like I’m your driver in a Rolls Royce.

But the reason I didn’t want to go to by James on the air is I think it comes with a connotation of a much higher intellect than the one I possess. You tune in for Jimmy, [you think] like a goofy show. You hear James, you’re going to expect a vocabulary I just don’t have.

Does New York or Washington have worse traffic? I’ll say it’s New York and here’s why: D.C. has more confusing roads because everything’s a traffic circle with a statue of a guy and a horse. And it’s really hard for landmarks.

The reason I say New York is worse though, is because New York is the only city where you signal after you’ve already made it into the next lane. With the reason being, that if you put on your blinker, like, “Hey, I’m going left,” they will block you. So instead you have to go left, then you put on your signal as like a middle finger to the guy behind you, like, “Haha, I made it.”

And I think that’s unique to New York and that we’re more competitive. Like D.C., you’re just screwed. You’re just in traffic.

You wrote the “Cancel Culture Dictionary.” What do you predict will get you canceled? I think the easy answer is my wardrobe. I know we got off the whole “defund the police” thing, but we need to defund the fashion police if I’m going to make it because I do make some choices on “Gutfeld.” I dress like a figure skater who let himself go. And at some point, that’s got to come back to get me.

I don’t think it’s my material because my vibe is like, “Hey, I don’t mean anything. I’m kind of harmless.”

I was looking at old pictures on my phone. I’ve committed some atrocities, like… leopard print. Nobody 240 pounds should be wearing leopard print under any circumstances. Like if you’re a 240-pound leopard, you should have the decency to wear solids. I’m not even kidding.

I have a fear of: Being misunderstood.

When I was in my 20s and 30s and kind of really getting to know the world, I really did buy into this idea that I could help. Man, it’s so stupid to say, and maybe it’s just because I’m new, but I would hate it if people labeled me like, “This guy’s some right-wing attack dog,” because I just so don’t want to be that guy.

I had such a good time growing up because I really was friends with everybody. I won seven “Class Favorites” in high school, and it wasn’t because I was particularly talented. I was just friendly with everybody, because I was raised in a really fun house. And I just wouldn’t want to be put in that other pile of “activist comedian,” because I’m like an inactivist. I don’t have the energy to protest. We’re not storming the Capitol. None of my fans could make it up that many steps — like if they put in like a tow rope, maybe.

But the point is I just want to be understood as I guess a good-natured dude.

Funniest politician: I mean this, so I want to give him credit: I think [President] Biden has a really good folksy charm. When he’s on the stump, he has a lot of anecdotes that he’s clearly told a million times. And he does deliver them well. At the White House Correspondents’ dinner, to his credit, he executed his material really well. He landed jokes against my network that he at least delivered them well, and I think he’s better at that than he gets credit for.

I think that if you wanted to know who I would trust the most with a monologue, I think he would deliver it better than anybody. I think the runner-up is [former President] Trump, but Trump is like almost unintentionally funny, because he likes to talk and then talk about what he said: “Wow, this is a wild crowd. I was just saying to myself, what a wild crowd.” There’s a redundancy to Trump that’s kind of cartoony.

But I give Biden credit for that; I do find him funny and I’m not even going to take a shot at him, I just find him funny.

Biggest accomplishment: Not getting killed in my sleep by my wife.

People say they didn’t have money in the bank — I didn’t even have a bank.

Knowing that we were as poor as we were and we did have life insurance, and you read those stories every day about how the woman is married to this dead-end guy and life would certainly be better if, you know, he got in a jet skiing accident. The fact that Jenny Failla didn’t kill me in the lean years I consider a big accomplishment.

Most embarrassing moment: I did a commercial for an app that doesn’t even exist anymore called the Flips mobile app, where I portrayed the Flips Fairy — this is a real thing.

They had me in a fairy costume, and the hook of the commercial was I flew into your house and I was going to show you how to use your TV.

They were like, “This is a regional commercial, it isn’t really going to run anywhere.” And they paid me like next to nothing because I was a cab driver at the time.

It wound up being on a nationwide truck campaign, and I was getting pictures from my friends and family all over the country of me on the back of trucks, and it was pretty hilarious, but not in a good way.

Biggest pet peeve: I think there’s too much performative anger in the world and specifically on social media. I read it, and it actually bothers me.

There’s this thing nowadays in our politics, where people’s anger is disproportionate to what’s happening. A good example would be Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce: No celebrity relationship should carry this much emotional resonance for anyone considering that we all know celebrity relationships have the life expectancy of a carnival goldfish. You’re usually flushing them down the toilet before the kid has even picked out a tank for the thing.

I feel like we got to this place where everybody has to take a side on everything. But the truth is, sometimes there’s not a side, there’s just like, a story. I think it’s the dumbest thing we’re doing right now.

I predict the rest of 2024 will be: Insane. I say that because when you look at the general election, which pretty much drives the news narrative from here, there’s already a faction calling Trump “Hitler.” In comedy, they say you don’t open with your closer. If we’re on Hitler in February, I don’t know where we go — like that should be your closer if you’re really looking to attack somebody. I don’t know where we go.

And then the other side is there’s so much tumult in the Democratic side of things in terms of whether Biden stays on the ticket or we get a [California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D)] or somebody else, that I just think it’s such a volatile news cycle. For me, we’re pretty uniquely positioned as an outlier, meaning we’re not going to feed into the thing. We’re going to be what I promised you we’d be, which is an autonomous zone. So, if nothing else, I am the one politician who’s trying to keep a campaign promise here.

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