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Joy

Jimmy Fallon asked his viewers why their high school was 'weird' and the responses were great

Here are 19 of our favorite responses.

via The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon/YouTube

Jimmy Fallon of the Tonight Show.

High schools are a perfect breeding ground for weirdness. First of all, you have a bunch of teenagers who are starting to deal with adult problems but they don’t have the experience or the brain development to figure out how to navigate complex feelings and relationships.

Then you add sex, drugs, learner’s permits, the stress of trying to get into college and really bad facial hair to the situation and you have all the ingredients for people and situations to go completely sideways.

Then there are the teachers. High school teachers tend to be a bit more eccentric than those in the younger grades because they are hired as specialists in a given field, such as history, math or science. Whereas teachers in younger grades have to be nurturing and have a more holistic approach to child development.

Also, hindsight makes a lot of things that seemed normal at the time begin to seem a bit strange. As we get older and have a firm grasp on the realities of being an adult, there are some things that we can’t believe we lived through as teenagers in high school.

When I was in high school we had a drama teacher that sat in the gym and chain-smoked while we rehearsed the play and we didn’t think anything of it. I’m pretty sure my home economics teacher hit the cooking sherry during lunchtime, and we got a day off from school due to the L.A. riots in 1992.

Everyone dealt with some amount of weirdness while they were in high school, so Jimmy Fallon asked his “Tonight Show” audience to share their stories with #MyHighSchoolWasWeird and he read some of his favorites on his show.

We took a look at the hashtag and picked some of the responses we liked the most. Here are 19 of them. Why was your high school weird? Tell us in the comments on Facebook.

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If you look back at how you acted, dressed and behaved in high school and have a little bit of shame, that’s probably a good thing. If you cringe a little when you think about your former self, that shows that you’ve grown as a person.

But wouldn’t it be great if you could go back to high school knowing what you know now? How much easier would it be to approach that special person you wanted to ask to the dance but couldn’t muster up the courage? How much more would you appreciate those carefree days when all you had to worry about was a bio test or who had a crush on whom in homeroom?

Personally, if I went back to high school I’d have a lot more appreciation for my teachers knowing just how hard of a job they have. Now that I’m an adult I have a lot more sympathy for what we put them through and I can totally understand why teaching at a high school can turn someone a little weird.

Here's Jimmy Fallon reading off some of his responses to #MyHighSchoolWasWeird.


This article originally appeared on 02.09.22

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Joy

Jimmy Fallon asked people to share their worst first dates, and some were just laughably bad

Romance doesn't always come easily, does it?

YouTube/Twitter

As the saying goes, "You have to kiss a few frogs..."

Dating has certainly evolved over the years—we’ve gone from courtship being purely a financial arrangement (not that this trend has ever truly died) to knights jousting for a lady’s favor, to casual hookups … and now, romance is primarily found through an app more than anything else.

Technology used for meeting that special someone has become so advanced that you can base your search entirely upon specific interests. Like … oddly specific interests. Think a fellow cat person would be the purrfect match? There’s an app for that. Wish to “love long and prosper” with a fellow Trekkie? There’s an app for that too.

No matter the changes, one thing remains the same—dating is awkward. It’s got all the unspoken formalities of a job interview, disguised as innocent fun. The balance between playing it too cool and too eager is hard to find even for the smoothest among us, and usually results in total embarrassment. Even if we aren’t the ones committing those embarrassing acts ourselves, we are often the reluctant witness to them.


Terrible dates might not always be fun in the moment, but they can be just as important as the good ones. They can teach us a lot about ourselves and what qualities we want in a partner. And at the very least, they can teach us to embrace social clumsiness with a sense of humor.

Jimmy Fallon recently asked his “Tonight Show” audience on Twitter to share a “funny or embarrassing first date story” for his ever popular #Hashtags segment. The best part—some of these awful first dates ended in marriage. There’s hope for us all.

Below, find 15 stories that are truly the best of the worst. How do some of your first dates compare?

1. "After a nice dinner, she invited me to her house. On the way up, inside the elevator, I decided to push the button to stop between floors and give her a kiss... She had a phobia of closed spaces and she smacked my face as a reflex, two punches after we were kissing and laughing.” – @PanqueAlgarvio

2. “His jeans were so tight he couldn’t sit down. Stood at a bar stool the whole time.” – @onlyintheozarks

3. “Waiting 4 my date when an older couple asked me for a ride. my date came up and said sure! We drove them home & they asked us to come in. Date said “sure”. I pulled him back & asked why he wanted to hang w/strangers. He said ‘sh@t! YOU DON'T KNOW THEM!?’ We bolted!” – @natashaham75

facebook dating

Talk about a fashion faux pas.

Giphy

4. “Before the date, we had been chatting about books we liked and I talked about a great book I just read. We went on the date. I loaned her the book. She ghosted me.” – @thenextbarstool

5. “The worst first date I ever had was when my date locked his keys in the car and I had a curfew so he had to break his car window out to get me home on time. Didn’t think I’d ever see him again but we wound up married.” – @csleblan

6. “First date movie ‘Basic Instinct’ not realizing how suggestive it was. We just thought it was a mystery thriller! We left the movie discussing how each character could have actually murdered someone. We're married now.” – @Southrnbell_Amy

black people meet

There are worse first date movies tbh.

Giphy

7. “First date with my ex husband was a double date with his parents. The preview for ‘Speed Racer’ came on, and she leaned over me to say to her son, ‘You know what your dad's nickname in the bedroom is?’" – @theostoria

8. “A friend asked me on a double date as a blind date with his date's friend. I went to the bathroom and came back just in time to hear my date say to her friend, ‘why do I get the ugly one?’ I said good night to all three and headed home, leaving her w/the bill.” – @StevenTrustum

9. “He loved cheese. I was subjected to a 2 hour conversation/lecture about cheese, and why cottage cheese is not cheese!” – @Optimist_Eeyore

bumble

I'd like to see this two-hour cheese lecture.

Giphy

10. “He took me to an Asian fish market. We walked around looking at live & dead fish for a while. I don’t like seeing dead animals & I don’t eat seafood. Then we sat on a curb & he pulled out a ziplock bag of pineapple for us to share. I don’t like pineapple.” – @markayhali

11. “My cousin set up a first date for me with a family friend. During a break from dinner, Mr. Man follows me into the ladies’ room, comes up close and says in a low voice, ‘I shave my butt.’ Can’t remember what I said in response but the evening ended abruptly.” – @carli_zarzana

12. “I once took out my high school crush to a sports bar and ordered the spiciest wings there in an attempt to impress her. Not only was she not impressed. The next morning I woke up with heartburn.” –@Dmonster38

tindr conversation starters

Talk about a hot date.

GIF

13. “My date showed up with his bestie and girlfriend, and they talked through dinner about people I don’t know. Walking to the car, he gave me a wedgie because he thought he hadn’t been paying enough attention to me.” – @surrealDazey


14. “I was taking my date home and was pulled over by the police for speeding. When the cop came to my car, she jumped out and told him she had to get home. She walked home and I never heard from her again. I'm not sure who's #WorstFirstDate it was mine or hers!” – @eastriverbear

15. “After an evening of dancing with a first date, leaving the dance hall, I had to take a quick pee break. Rushing out to the parking lot, I see a lady, I grab her and swoop her around, and plant a big wet kiss on the lips. She was another guy's wife. Oops!” – @seadogskamore

date you

Only Gomez could have gotten away with it.

Giphy This article originally appeared on 9.22.22

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Pop Culture

Matthew McConaughey and Jimmy Fallon rapping 'Just Because' is the pep talk we all need

McConaughey woke up in the middle of the night with these verses and rhythm in his head and turned them into an inspirational book for kids.

Fallon Tonight/TikTok

"Just Because" is Matthew McConaughey's children's book filled with rhyming bits of wisdom.

At 2:30 a.m., actor Matthew McConaughey woke up from a dream with a jingle in his head. He got up, started writing it down, and just like that, a children's book was born.

McConaughey's picture book, "Just Because" may be for kids, but adults are finding inspiration for themselves in it as well. A viral video of McConaughey country-rapping the book's couplets with talk show host Jimmy Fallon got people talking about the lessons on the book that speak to them the most, such as the person who said they wanted a "Just because I want one more doesn't mean that I need two" sign for their refrigerator.

The "alright, alright, alright" actor and the famously musical Fallon start off just lowkey "reading" the book with a little background beat, but soon they each have a mic in their hands in a full-on performance.

With lines like, "Just because you can pull it off, doesn't mean that you should do it, and just because you fail that don't mean that you blew it," McConaughey and Fallon manage to make a sing-songy rap out of some genuinely good life lessons.

Watch:

@fallontonight

Jimmy and #MatthewMcConaughey rap their way through “Just Because”. #FallonTonight

So how did Matthew McConaughey end up writing a children's book in the first place? The father of three told the hosts of Podcrushed that he'd been thinking a lot about fatherhood and how the lens of parenthood changes everything. He said when something consumes his mind, he tends to have dreams about it.

"This was a dream I had, and I woke up at 2:30 in the morning, I went and wrote it down. All I had was the jingle, 'Just because they threw the dart don't mean that it stuck, and just because I got some skills don't mean that there's no luck.' It was a song. I woke up and I got this great Bob Dylan diddy: 'Just because you're wailing doesn't meant that you're a crier, just because I lied does not mean that I'm a liar.' And so the hook was 'just because,' and I had the beat, and I just wrote from 2:30 to 6:30 in the morning. Went back, got in bed. Got up and looked at it and was like, 'This is good. This is fun.'"

He showed the idea to his kids, who each had different takes on different couplets. The conversations that the "just because" statements sparked in his own family demonstrated the potential for the book to be a conversation starter for all parents and kids, which is what McConaughey hopes it will do.

It even offers food for thought for people without kids.

"I didn't know I needed a pep talk from Matthew McConaughey, let alone in this form, but alright, alright," wrote one commenter.

"It's supposed to be a kids book but I also lowkey need this at 35," wrote another.

"Would it be weird to buy this for my team at work?" asked one person.

"Just because I went straight to Amazon to buy this book don't mean I'm a sucker," wrote another.

McConaughey seems to have a hit on his hands. You can find "Just Because" on Amazon or support independent booksellers by purchasing through Bookshop.org.

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Pop Culture

Paul Rudd and Jimmy Fallon teamed up for a ridiculously delightful duet about beanies

They managed to find 12 words that rhymed with "beanie."

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon/Youtube

They wear teenies weenies beanies while sipping dry martinis.

Sometimes you listen to a song and have no idea whether you just experienced complete stupidity or utter genius. “Teenie Weenie Beanie” is one of those songs.

The song is about, you guessed it, tiny beanie hats, which might not seem like a bop at first. But when sung by two expert goofballs, Paul Rudd and Jimmy Fallon, it becomes far too silly not to love.

Plus, they managed to find 12 words that rhymed with "beanie." Even Dr. Seuss would be impressed.

Fans who watched couldn’t deny that it was an instant earworm. Here’s a taste of what people are saying:

“Weirdest bop of the century. I can't stop watching and smiling. Thanks Rudd and Jimmy.”

“Great!! Now THAT'S going to be stuck in my head for the next week!! LMAO!”

“Pure joy! My face hurts from smiling so hard. Here I go to watch again!”

“I literally was like oh no at the end, cause i know for the rest of the day, ‘its a teenie weenie beanie’ is gonna play in my head over and over again.”

Just take a listen and try not to get this stuck in our head, I dare you.

You’re welcome. Go ahead and watch it six more times. You know you want to.

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