Jimmy Fallon gets ripped on a lot for being blandly positive and (mostly) avoiding politics on The Tonight Show, but he’s actually a very funny guy. Case in point, a clip of his monologue has been going viral this week in which Fallon jokes about “swallowing fish sticks,” and Steve Higgins found the whole thing very gross. Now it’s inspiring a bit of pushback on the Internet, however.
During a monologue segment on The Tonight Show earlier this week, Fallon recounted how a man “broke a world record by swallowing 15 fish sticks in one minute.” A grossed-out Higgins misheard and told Fallon he thought it was a “family show.” Not exactly how I would characterize The Tonight Show anyway, but needless to say, many people on the Internet were very amused by this joke. Take a look.
Jimmy Fallon may have just earned a spot on LateNighter's year-end best jokes list. pic.twitter.com/YlUcPI0pPMJuly 29, 2026
Now, however, South Park fans in the know are calling it out as… fishy. That’s because the joke, while about a new world record, is actually really about how "sticks" sounds like "dicks." In fact, it harkens back to “Fishsticks,” a 2009 episode of South Park about this joke's literal origins. In it, Cartman and Jimmy argue over the similar sounds of “fish sticks” and “fish dicks.”
If you’ve been watching the show over the past 20 years, I'd get it, there's a lot of episodes, and you’d be forgiven if you happened to miss this. Still, “Fishsticks” actually ranks on CinemaBlend’s list of the 10 best South Park episodes and additionally is an outrageous episode from Trey Parker and Matt Stone to boot. In short, it’s one people cite all the time. It’s got Kanye West. It’s got original music. It’s got people claiming credit who deserve no credit.
That’s where the joke parallels The Tonight Show. In the episode, the joke starts going around the city of South Park and Cartman tries to take credit for it (not exactly nice), leaving Jimmy out in the cold. While they are arguing about the literal origins of who came up with the joke, it goes viral, and Carlos Mencia then claims credit. Kanye West doesn’t get the bit, though. So, he beats up Mencia, and then tracks down Cartman and Jimmy, who are back to taking credit. The whole thing ends with an Aquaman-looking Kanye West taking on a new identity as a gay fish in the ocean. It’s vicious to Kanye and a memorable episode as a whole.
So, it’s really bizarre that as part of the TV schedule 17 years later The Tonight Show is using a joke that was created to illustrate how sort of mundane jokes can get passed around and recycled by comedians, and how people can take credit for stuff that happens in Hollywood they really just pilfered and recycled from elsewhere. Obviously, some people found this joke very funny, but lots of South Park fans did call the moment out.
- He stole this from South Park…
- Sure just shamelessly rip off South Park and take the credit
- Stealing a 15 year old South Park joke is still light years ahead of Kimmel
- Blatantly ripping off one of the most famous South Park jokes good lord
- What’s the statute of limitations for ripping off old South Park jokes?
In a way, I get how the fish stick/ fish dick joke was perfect in context for this monologue moment, but using the joke in this context to directly prove South Park's point sort of boggles the mind. The monologue would have been perfectly fine if it had gone in a different direction.
