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Jim Gaffigan Celebrates Father’s Day 2016 With Jimmy Fallon & The Tonight Show [Video]

By Lauren Moccio
Published on: 11:51 PST, Jun 19, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAXmxjepBCQ

Comedian Jim Gaffigan appeared alongside viral video juggernaut and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon on NBC on Thursday night, according to comedy industry blog Splitsider, for a Father’s Day “last-minute gift guide” joke segment that doubled as a promo for the second season of Gaffigan’s TV Land sitcom, The Jim Gaffigan Show. The show’s second season premieres this Sunday night, which is Father’s Day in the United States. The “gift guide” included gag gifts such as giant gummy worms and a beer helmet, as well as jokey plugs for both of Jim Gaffigan’s books, Dad is Fat and Food: A Love Story — both New York Times bestsellers.

Jimmy Fallon’s children’s book, Your Baby’s First Word Will Be DADA, also got a mention as a potential Father’s Day gift, though much of it was Jim Gaffigan holding up the book, slowly flipping (as much as you can “flip” the pages of a board book) through it while teasing Fallon about the lack of actual text — much of the book (which is also available in picture book format in addition to the board book shown in the Tonight Show clip) has only one word per page. The book is geared toward toddlers first learning to talk and perhaps learning their letters.

“Jimmy, you wrote this book that has six words in it? […] Does that qualify as writing, Jimmy?”

Jim Gaffigan also launched into a cute running bit involving the aforementioned giant gummy worms, wherein he made the spurious claims that he and wrestling legend The Rock had once been roommates and that Gaffigan received the gummy worms as a Father’s Day gift from The Rock — who had earned his nickname due to his penchant for eating rock candy.

Jim Gaffigan also took a sizeable bite out of one of the giant gummy worms despite Jimmy Fallon’s attempts to stop him (they do teach you in theater school to avoid eating on stage or on camera if at all possible!) and heroically soldiered on with the bit for an impressive amount of time before finally having to spit it out.

“Wouldn’t it be great if I choked and died right now? […] Do people really eat that?!”

Jim Gaffigan and his wife, actress, television producer, and comedy writer Jeannie Gaffigan, have five children. Comic actress Ashley Williams (How I Met Your Mother) plays Jeannie Gaffigan on The Jim Gaffigan Show, which is based on the real-life experiences of Jim Gaffigan and his wife attempting to raise five children in a characteristically cramped, two-bedroom New York City apartment. Jim Gaffigan stars opposite Williams as a fictionalized version of himself.

The age differences between the real Gaffigan children were shortened in writing the fictionalized children’s characters for The Jim Gaffigan Show, and co-writer and executive producer Jeannie Gaffigan pointed this out to The Huffington Post when discussing its world premiere in March 2015.

“The TV kids are sort of a snapshot of an earlier time in our lives when they were all younger. We wanted to show what life was like a few years ago, when we had two kids in diapers and one in pull-ups at night. By putting the kids’ ages all closer together, it sort of heightens the reality of it.”

Jim Gaffigan’s Father’s Day segment also featured a comically fast scroll of his upcoming comedy tour dates and venues. Gaffigan’s comedy tour begins at home on June 26 at the famous 92nd Street Y in New York City.

Jimmy Fallon and his wife, film producer Nancy Juvonen, have two daughters under the age of three, Winnie Rose and Frances Cole — the inspirations for Fallon’s children’s book. Both girls were born by gestational surrogate.

TV Land, which airs The Jim Gaffigan Show, is under the Viacom parent company umbrella and is not affiliated with NBC Universal.

[Image courtesy of Craig Barritt/Getty Images]

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