Protesters outside The Walt Disney Company’s Headquarters on Thursday.Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
In an environment where political reality is being sidestepped or denied, sometimes the best jokes are simply stating the truth in the rhythm of a set-up and punchline.
On Sunday night, for instance, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver comedy writer Daniel O’Brien accepted the award for outstanding scripted variety series at the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles with this type of joke that was not exactly funny.
“We share this category, and are honoured to share it, with all writers of late-night political comedy – while that is still a type of show that’s allowed to exist,” he said.
Ba-dum-ching.
Three days later, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show – which President Donald Trump had said he’d heard “was next” in a social-media post in July gloating about the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s CBS late-night show – was indefinitely suspended on ABC.
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Jimmy Kimmel Live! went on hiatus hours after Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC and its parent company, Disney, on a podcast – claiming Kimmel had displayed “the sickest conduct possible” in the wake of conservative podcaster and political organizer Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Meanwhile, Trump is suing The New York Times; his allies in Congress have defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; and on social media, Trump has called for more late-night show hosts to be axed.
“That leaves Jimmy [Fallon] and Seth [Meyers], two total losers, on Fake News NBC,” he posted Wednesday. “Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”
Contrary to Carr’s comments, Kimmel hadn’t said anything sick about Kirk in the lead-up to his show being pulled.
Indeed, the day after the killing, the talk-show host sent his love to the Kirks on Instagram, and in his monologue he expressed his concerns about reactions from the left and right.
“I’ve seen a lot of extraordinarily vile responses to this from both sides of the political spectrum,” he said. “Some people are cheering this, which is something I won’t ever understand.”
The pretext for Kimmel being off the air – and that’s the only accurate way to describe it, as a pretext – is a line from this Monday’s monologue.
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said – giving a rather lifeless reading of the cues the day after what was probably a late night at the Emmy Awards.
This was part of the set-up for a joke about Trump, who was quick to blame the “radical left” for Kirk’s assassination the very day he was killed and said he would go after organizations that fund it and support it.
The President had given a reporter a strange response when asked how he was holding up after his friend’s death – pivoting, without emotion, to talking about the new ballroom being built at the White House.
“He’s at the fourth stage of grief: construction,” Kimmel said.
Perhaps mean to a man in mourning.
But the charge from Carr is not meanness, but that Kimmel was misleading the public about Kirk’s alleged assassin.
Whether you watch the monologue on YouTube or just read the plain words, it’s clear that Kimmel isn’t throwing out an accusation that the suspect was MAGA – but highlighting how many on the right were scoring political points off Kirk’s death even the motive remained uncertain over the weekend.
It was only on Sunday that Spencer Cox, the Republican Governor of Utah, had said on NBC’s Meet the Press that “there clearly was a leftist ideology with this assassin.” But he also said there would be more news coming when charges were pressed on Tuesday.
What the wording of Kimmel’s Monday monologue likely reflects is how the late-night show is made – recorded in the afternoon in a way that has to land at 11:30 p.m., even if there is late-breaking news, which, these days, there so often is.
Not setting a narrative about Kirk’s alleged assassin the day before charges are laid is the responsible path for a late-night jokester, as it should be for a journalist, as it absolutely should be for a president.
Truth is, there was only one late-night talk-show host spreading dubious information about an assassination on Monday.
That would be Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld of Gutfeld!, who also appears on a morning show called The Five, where, as if to prove Kimmel’s point about the MAGA movement, he said he didn’t need to wait for any more information on Kirk’s killer.
“What is interesting here is, why this is only happening on the left and not the right?” Gutfeld asked.
Co-host Jessica Tarlov then brought up Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota House of Representatives speaker emerita and a Democrat who was killed with her husband in June.
Gutfeld erupted with real fury in response, saying he’d never heard of the Democrat before she was killed – and that she hadn’t been demonized before her death. “It was a specific crime against her by somebody that knew her,” he said.
Minnesota authorities have not alleged that Vance Boelter, who is accused of the political assassination of Hortman – and also shooting another Democrat, Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman, and his wife – knew her personally.
It certainly seems to me that, by contrast, Kimmel was practising late night exactly the right way. If none of what’s happening in the U.S. right now is funny, don’t blame the comedians.
