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Jimmy Kimmel pulled indefinitely by ABC for Charlie Kirk comments.
Late night talk show hosts have waned from their glorious Letterman days, but boomers still care about then enough that they're still a scalp worth scraping off the skull. It's hard to think of a prominent figure on the right that would be equal in stature - Gina Carano? Piers Morgan? Roseanne Barr? nothing like him - if only for the fact that the entertainment industry is so aligned to the left. Indeed, even during the height of the progressive cancel culture era, it was liberal icons like Louis CK and JK Rowling that felt the heat.
If such a big figure can fall, who will be next?
With Colbert going off the air, and with the upcoming FCC hearings on Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and Steam, one can only anticipate the prizes that are coming. Destiny and Hasan are obvious trophies that the right would love to claim, but I have no doubt that the powerjanitors of Reddit are quaking in their boots. How many leftist/liberal commentators have made snarky comments on social media, as of late? This is the reddest of the red meat, dripping with blood, raw. The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.
Once again, I'm seeing the center left Ryan Grim types run with "Jimmy Kimmel was fired for a joke! What, is comedy illegal now?"
I have to ask, what was the joke? What was the setup? What was the punchline? If this were a rant Tim Dillon were delivering, and the context is we are laughing at what a sociopath Tim Dillon is, and that he's saying shit no human being could possibly believe with a straight face, ok. Has that become Jimmy Kimmel's act? Was the joke that he's so retarded and Trump Deranged that this is funny?
Falling back on "It's just a joke" is the bully behavior of people who abuse you. When you get upset at being punched, called a faggot, and having you D&D books stolen, they go "It's just a joke, lighten up". "It's just a joke" is always the last defense of the bully when the bill finally comes due.
The quote above is the pre-amble for the actual "joke" -- https://x.com/suayrez/status/1968464780940673083 For those who don't want to watch, Kimmel shows a clip of reporters asking Trump how he is holding up and Trump saying "I think very good" then pointing to construction of the White House ballroom and boasting about it, to which Kimmel makes the actual "joke": "This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish,"
To judge whether this is appropriate, imagine this in a more politically neutral circumstance. Imagine the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys had just been murdered by a deranged Eagles fan. A journalist catches Cowboys owner Jerry Jones at some random moment and asks him, "how are you holding up?" and he says "just fine" and points to a new improvement to the football stadium. Would it be in the realm of appropriateness for a late-night comedian to take a shot at Jerry Jones for this response? No. People have all sorts of responses to grief, he might have just wanted to change the subject because he did not want to talk about it with the journalist, he might have been trying to put on a brave face. Telling a national audience that "this is not how an adult grieves his friend" and saying this man who just suffered a traumatic loss "is acting like a four year old" would be considered a terrible thing to say, far beyond the pale. Any broadcast channel comedian would have faced a suspension for a joke that off-base.
It was absolutely a cheap potshot by Kimmel, and it shows that Kimmel is a lot more concerned with taking potshots at Trump than he cares about the fact that the political climate is heated enough to produce this kind of assassination.
If I was in Trump's position, being publicly insulted and told I'm grieving like a four-year-old when my friend and ally was just assassinated would fill be with a hot rage and I would want to use every tool in my disposable to destroy the person who insulted me. George Washington had his seconds kill people in duels for less than this.
It is said that a republic requires a virtuous citizenry. Well, "don't make cheap and nasty insults at the leader when they are assassination the murder of their ally" is part of the virtue needed to maintain a republic where free speech exists.
How is it connected? I watched the clip until he started talking about the Emmys, and didn't notice anything that built off of that supposed setup. Let's go line-by-line:
How is "desperately trying to characterize [him] as anything other than one of them" supposed to be the preamble for a joke? Did I simply stop watching too soon?
Yes, you did stop too soon, actually. That's the quote that's been cited everywhere, but the bit is significantly longer with several cross-cuts. That's only the intro! This is probably the best text description of the segment if you don't want to watch it. I'm a text>video supremacist, but video does capture some nuance if you care: namely, the pacing and tone of his voice in that entire quote is literally just a lead-up.
The main bit is that Trump doesn't actually care about Kirk, and merely finds his death occasionally politically convenient. The specific laugh-line is about Trump grieving like a 4-year old grieves for a goldfish. And then another few clips the thrust of which is Trump when asked tends to change the subject away from Kirk quickly. Which, you can think of it how you like, you may even consider it cruel, but the whole thing is not being viewed contextually.
To put it again very clearly: the takeaway from this segment of a longer monologue is that Trump sucks as a person. The reference to Kirk's killer's motive is done in passing. It's wrong, obviously, and most people would agree it's wrong, but it's a comedy lead-in to a joke not a newscast and it was a day before the gold-standard evidence came out that put it all to bed. Remember, the FBI was super stingy with their evidence release cadence and most newscasters were going mostly off of scraps, often without even primary source attribution (e.g. Governor Cox claimed that the FBI found out that someone close to the shooter said _) so it was hard to tell in many cases which piece of info came from where. (And while Kimmel holds responsibility I wouldn't be surprised if the actual paragraph quote's copy was written by some overworked staff writer instead)
Notably absent in this response is how the disinformation claim is structurally part of the joke. You point to the goldfish as the laugh line, but the goldfish line is not set up by the MAGA accusation. Kimmel's insult is before the goldfish line, but this is sequential context, not structural composition. Appealing to the pacing and tone of the voice is an appeal to the means of delivery, not the structure of the joke.
The distinction @ulyssessword is asking is clearer if you have a more obvious 2-part joke structure, and then place something else inside that structure.
'Why did the chicken cross the road?' 'To get to the other side.'
This is a two-part joke structure.
'Why did the chicken cross the road?' 'My outgroup is terrible for trying to deflect their culpability for murder.' 'To get to the other side.' 'Also, Trump bad.'
This is still a two-part joke structure.
It has additional parts in and after, but it's still a two-part joke, regardless of how smooth the delivery or transition between the joke/not-joke parts are. Placing the two-part joke in the context of the broader Trump bad monologue does not change the structure of the joke. The joke being part of the monologue does not make other parts of the monologue- such as the disinformation accusation- part of the joke.
It's not structurally part of the joke, though? The joke, such as it is, makes perfect sense without the intro - thus it's clearly a throwaway lead-in. It's there as a transition. If you cut off everything before (2:15) "In between the finger pointing there was grieving... uh, on Friday the White House... (quote continues)" it still makes sense. Heck, you can even cut off everything before "on Friday" and a random viewer would perfectly understand. (Kirk is even introduced as the topic within the video clip; again, the intro is completely disposable).
Why is that relevant? No one is paying attention to his insinuation that Kirk's killer was MAGA, or at least most viewers aren't. It's not the same thing as a newscast where the main news headline is false, which is what the FCC might get mad at. Obviously the prominence of a claim should directly bear on the seriousness of a deception, and that's doubly true when the purpose is not to convey news. The purpose is, more or less, to have fun doing "boo outgroup", and that's allowed to happen on TV by a comedian.
Who was deceived, and how badly? Anyone who read the news certainly isn't going to throw out whatever facts they read because Kimmel insinuated something in passing. Anyone who doesn't read the news might get the wrong impression, but again, even a trivial attempt at fact-finding would quickly reveal the truth. And in fact, the very next day we DID get the truth, and in far more detail.
Is it really the betrayal of the "public interest" of an entire channel that a comedian subconsciously gave people the wrong impression about something? Because to be clear that's basically the full extent of it.
If it's not about the whole public interest thing, then it's not a conversation about factual accuracy, it's a conversation about what constitutes poor enough taste to take a comedian off the air. The FCC's Carr engaged in a deliberate bait and switch by conflating the two. And many of you here fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.
"Hit a new low, desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them" is straightforwardly an accusation. Anyone who claims otherwise is not a serious person and is probably operating in bad faith.
Knowingly and falsely accusing the President's supporters of assassination on national television has never been within the Overton Window, at least as far as keeping a cushy entertainment job is concerned. I don't know what you think you gain by describing it as "in passing" like that means it doesn't count.
If some left-wing activist got their brains blown out in public by a right-winger and a television host went on the air within the week to tell us "Obama and his goons are desperate to characterize this as anything other than themselves" they'd be fired in five seconds, nobody in the media would even think to question it, and we all god damn well know it.
There is not enough wordcel gaslighting in the universe to pull off what some of you people are trying to pull off, and the attempts are comical.
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