Westbury comedian Jimmy Failla to host 'Fox News Saturday Night'

Jimmy Failla, a Westbury comic, Long Island born-and-raised, will be headlining Fox News’ year-old comedic panel-discussion show “Fox News Saturday Night,” starting Jan. 13 at 10 p.m.

Failla, born in Manhasset and raised in Levittown, says he has been preparing for this for most of his 47 years.

“When I was in fifth grade at Abbey Lane Elementary School in Levittown, I had a teacher, Mrs. Pascana, who told me to watch ‘The Tonight Show’ because she thought I could get one of those shows someday. Now, she might've just been saying that because she'd seen my report cards,” jokes Failla, who has done stand-up since the 2000s, “and knew I wasn't going to get hired anywhere else. But I watched it every day. I really thought someday I could get one of these shows.”

That he was a funny fifth grader came out of unfunny circumstances. “For me, comedy has always been a survival tool,” he says. “I grew up the youngest of four kids. Everyone in my family — my uncles, my cousins, my two older brothers — all of them are cops but me. So as you imagine, I got picked on and beat up a lot as a kid. But comedy kept me in the good graces of my brothers, who might otherwise drown me in an aboveground pool or chase me with a whiffle-ball bat through [the toy store] Child World.”

Failla — whose special “They’re Just Jokes,” shot at The Paramount in Huntington, began streaming on Fox Nation on Jan. 3 — stuck with it. After being named senior class “Biggest Story Teller” in his 1995 Division Avenue High School yearbook, he went on to an associate degree in communication studies at Nassau Community College, though he never considered any vocation but comedy.

His first open-mic was “June 24th, 2001,” he recalls. “Carolines on Broadway. It was a Sunday afternoon. I'm pretty sure Caroline didn't even know we were there. It was the first time I did comedy seriously.” Comedy even helped land him his wife, Jennifer, whom he met at an Ohio comedy club in 2003 and married in 2006; they now have a 15-year-old son, Lincoln.

It took roughly a decade for Failla to make a full-time living at it. From 2008 to 2010, he drove a taxi 60 hours a week, he says, for New York City-based Ann Service Corp. He briefly got back in that game in 2014, renting a cab in order to film passenger reactions to having an albino Burmese python in with them. The ensuing shrieks he recorded for the YouTube video “Snakes in a Cab” would have gotten his license revoked, a Taxi & Limousine Commission spokesperson said at the time, but Failla “surrendered it voluntarily.”

He eventually found a home at Fox News, making guest appearances on shows including “The Fox News Specialists,” “Fox and Friends Weekend,” “Watters' World” and “The Greg Gutfeld Show.” Despite the cable channel’s conservative perspective, he asserts that as host of “Fox News Saturday Night” he will skewer targets on both sides of the political aisle. 

Regardless, “I bill my radio show, ‘Fox Across America,’ as an audio safe space for cool people,” he says, using “safe space” seriously and not as a punch line. “And what I say on the radio that I'm going to say on ‘Fox News Saturday Night’ is: ‘You can be a Republican, you can be a Democrat, just don't be a bleep.’ ”