In what may be the most compelling evidence I’ve yet seen that NFTs are multi-dimensionally awful, here’s a clip of Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon awkwardly showing off their low-quality drawings of apes in stupid hats to an audience that seems equal parts bemused and bored (embedded below).
“This is your ape!” Fallon says, pulling the picture of Hilton’s NFT from behind his desk to show the viewers, who take a long few seconds to react with tepid applause.
“I was going through a lot of them,” Hilton replies, explaining the process by which she decided to spend money on this specific bad picture. “I was like, I want something that, like, kind of reminds me of me. But—this one, it does.”
The conversation grinds on a bit longer until Fallon pulls out his own NFT, eliciting some chuckles from the crowd. “It reminded me of me a little bit,” Fallon explained, desperately trying to fill the silence. Finally, he put the pictures side by side and said, “They’re buddies,” at which point someone presumably switched on the “Applause” sign, the crowd obliged, and the clip mercifully ended.
It was not a good segment, but it did inspire some hilariously brutal reactions on Twitter:
god SPEED. If anyone can kill NFT culture, it’s Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton https://t.co/VV3ei9zLTnJanuary 25, 2022
This clip was scientifically engineered to make me want to lie down in traffic. https://t.co/twXCN3uaF3January 25, 2022
i genuinely worried i was having a stroke for the first 15 seconds “I got an ape too, because I saw you on the show with beeple and you said you got on moonpay!” is surely worth putting that doomsday clock a minute closer to midnight, no? https://t.co/Ldt4E0FyAOJanuary 25, 2022
We could’ve just brought back neopets and taken that shit seriously. https://t.co/h1viZ6ptxDJanuary 25, 2022
Even some NFT supporters were put off by the display.
Paris Hilton on Jimmy Fallon show hurts me more than #ETH dropping 50% #NFTs #NFTCommunityJanuary 25, 2022
Hilton is well-versed in NFTs: She told Bloomberg in November 2021 that she has “been obsessed with NFTs and the never-ending possibilities of this technology” since launching her first NFT in March 2020. She’s also backed other NFT-related projects over the past couple of years, including Origin Protocol, a decentralized NFT platform.
Fallon, on the other hand, is apparently new to the scene, but that didn’t stop him from going all in. He revealed on November 11 that he’d purchased a Bored Ape NFT using MoonPay, a cryptocurrency transaction platform.
So this just happened. @jimmyfallon reveals to @beeple on the #TheTonightShow that he just bought his first Bored Ape by @BoredApeYC with MoonPay! 🚀👀Watch below! 😜 pic.twitter.com/oqXEOHMctENovember 11, 2021
The NFT community (via Yahoo Finance) quickly sussed out that the last previous transaction involving that NFT took place on November 8, just three days prior to Fallon’s reveal, when it was purchased for 46.6 Ethereum. At the time, that much Ethereum was worth—hold on to your sailor hats—$221,000. Ethereum has tanked in the weeks since, however, and is currently worth just half that value. Maybe Jimmy should’ve bought a boat instead.
Later in the show, Hilton revealed an NFT series of her own and gave one to every person in the audience.
if i was a tourist and went to a jimmy fallon show for fun and ended up becoming an owner of an NFT i would sue https://t.co/nudmCSzw0qJanuary 25, 2022
