ABC pulled late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air “indefinitely” Wednesday night following pressure from the Federal Communications Commission over comments Kimmel made on the suspect apprehended for the killing of right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk.
Kimmel’s suspension comes after a monologue Monday night in which he said, “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.” Many read this as Kimmel implying that the shooter himself was right-wing.
Late-night talk show monologues are supposed to be funny, not rigorous journalism. It’s very unusual for a comedian to be suspended because of one, and it’s clear that Kimmel would not have been suspended if President Donald Trump’s FCC had not put extraordinary pressure on Disney-ABC. (In this case, that pressure was applied via Nexstar Media, the largest owner of TV stations in the US, which announced it would preempt Kimmel’s show. Nexstar is currently awaiting FCC approval for a planned $6.2 billion acquisition.) On Thursday morning, amid mounting outcry over Kimmel’s suspension, it was reported that ABC “hopes to have the matter resolved and the show return.”
The whole controversy is a shocking turn both in the Trump administration’s escalating war on its critics and in Jimmy Kimmel’s once pointedly apolitical career. Kimmel, after all, has spent most of his career embodying one archetype: regular American straight white dude. What could be more harmless and less controversial than that?
Kimmel started his career as a comic and radio host, an approachable everyman. In his first major television role as a host of Comedy Central’s Win Ben Stein’s Money in 1997, he was the audience surrogate, with his schlubby persona and his blue-collar accent an easy balance to Stein’s erudite snobbery. When Kimmel became the co-host of The Man Show in 1999, he was continuing to play the same character, only with the boorishness dialed up: leering at hot girls and circulating petitions to end women’s suffrage. In the raunch-obsessed 2000s, the crassness played as edgy: not politically correct, certainly, but the kind of thing it was assumed any man would probably do, if he could only unleash his id.
Kimmel left The Man Show in 2003 to launch Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC, where he dialed down the ogling but maintained his everyday dude persona. He also stayed away from talking too much politics. In those years when The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were at the height of their power and influence, Kimmel’s biggest running gag was a mock feud with Matt Damon. Regular guys, after all, are not policy wonks. They like making chill jokes about movie stars.
When the guy from The Man Show becomes Walter Cronkite
Kimmel wouldn’t start to get political in earnest until 2017,