It’s graduation season. A time when caps fly, parents cry, and students briefly feel like the world is theirs — even if the real world couldn’t care less how they feel.
At Fordham University this year, something extraordinary happened. Out walked Jimmy Fallon — not to give a speech, but to DJ. Sort of.
“I’ve never done this before,” he joked to the crowd. “Can I just plug in my phone?”
They laughed. Loudly. The good kind of laughter — the kind that’s free, not forced. He queued up “Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd, and just like that, the room transformed. In truth, the roof almost came off the building.
Then the real magic happened. Out of nowhere, The Weeknd himself — real name Abel Tesfaye, arguably the biggest pop star on the planet — walked onto the stage.
The look on the students’ faces? Sheer, unfiltered joy. Jaws dropped. Eyes lit up. People giggled uncontrollably, screamed like they never screamed before. (RELATED: David Brooks Still Can’t Say the Word ‘God’)
Now, what’s my point?
That moment mattered. Not because of who was onstage, but because of what it cut through. We live in a culture so poisoned by cynicism, politics, and digital sneering that something as simple as a surprise DJ set now feels like an act of rebellion. These are vitriolic times, where joy feels suspect, and neutrality is treated like betrayal.
It’s become fashionable to hate on joy.
Fallon made the conscious choice not to wade into the nightly low-blow politics that so many of his peers bathe in. Yes, he had Trump on his show. Yes, he ruffled his hair. And yes, he pokes fun at politicians. But not in a mean, divisive way. Not in the way that tells half the country they’re beneath laughter. Although no late-night host today holds a candle to Conan, who mastered the art of being absurd, brilliant, and subversive without ever being cruel, Fallon is the closest we’ve got when it comes to just being funny. (RELATED: The Politics of Comedy)
Granted, Fallon’s brand of joy might be over-the-top, sometimes goofy, maybe even cloying to the irony-addled. But those subway sing-alongs? Those college pop-ins? The way he shows up with Ed Sheeran and busks in the middle of New York for no reason other than to see people smile? That’s not fake. That’s not manufactured. That’s real. The guy’s not trying to save the Republic — he’s just trying to remind people that it feels good to smile.
Fallon isn’t dangerous. He’s not trying to dismantle institutions. He’s not waging war on MAGA. He’s not patronizing viewers, nor is he offering “edgy” social critiques. He’s just out here reminding us how to laugh like children. And if that bothers people, maybe the problem isn’t Fallon.
It’s us.
It’s the algorithm that rewards contempt. The moral purists who can’t smile without checking if it’s politically coherent. The performative left and the culture war right, both obsessed with being offended — for different reasons, but with equally dead eyes.
We talk endlessly about unity, but we forget what it feels like. For a brief moment on a college campus, hundreds of people were completely united — not by ideology, not by grievance, but by a shared thrill. A why-is-this-happening surge of joy that didn’t need to be explained, defended, or dissected.
That’s rare now. Far rarer than it should be.
Yes, there are problems. Wokeness, backlash to wokeness, political theater, culture wars, spiraling debt, algorithmic derangement. But not everything needs to be viewed through that rotten lens. Strip away the tribalism, and most people, left, right, in between, are far more alike than unlike. We want safety, purpose, connection. We want to be surprised, delighted, moved.
We want The Weeknd to crash our graduation. We want to laugh like a giddy toddler. We want to throw our heads back and forget about the outside world for a few minutes.
And if that means Jimmy Fallon plugs in his phone and plays the same song a thousand DJs have played before, good. That’s the point. It’s familiar. It’s fun. It’s human.
We’re told every day that we’re divided beyond repair. That we hate each other. That the lines are drawn, the tribes are fixed, and the other side is not just wrong, but dangerous. That there’s no common ground left, no language we all still speak.
But then something like this happens, a moment of unfiltered fun, completely unscripted, and it reminds us: that’s not entirely true.
Joy still works. It still hits like lightning. It still pulls people out of their silos, even if only for a song. These moments don’t fix everything. But they remind us there’s still something underneath the noise worth protecting. Something human.
The roof can still come off. We just have to stop staring at the walls long enough to notice.
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