On Wednesday evening, ABC indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel, the host of its late-night show, after Kimmel discussed in his opening monologue the Trump Administration and the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was murdered last week. Some viewers accused Kimmel of erroneously suggesting that Kirk’s alleged shooter was MAGA, which Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called “some of the sickest conduct possible.” Hours before the suspension was announced, Carr raised the idea of punishing local television stations that continued to air Kimmel’s show. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said. Kimmel’s suspension was the latest in a string of attacks by the Trump Administration on media outlets, and especially on broadcast television networks. Disney, which owns ABC, and Paramount, which owns CBS, had already settled two frivolous lawsuits (for defamation and deceptive editing, respectively) that Trump brought against them. CBS News, now under new ownership, has taken a number of steps—such as hiring a conservative ombudsman—that were pushed by Carr. On Thursday, Trump explicitly stated that networks employing late-night hosts critical of him should potentially have their broadcast licenses revoked.
To talk about Kimmel’s suspension, and more broadly about authoritarian leaders and their response to comedy, I called Michael Idov, a novelist and filmmaker who ran GQ Russia between 2012 and 2014, and wrote and directed the 2019 film “The Humorist,” about a fictional comedian in the late Soviet era. (Idov’s most recent novel is “The Collaborators.”) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the similarities and differences between Trump’s and Putin’s approaches to cracking down on comedy and culture, the speed of Trump’s attack on institutions in his second term, and Russian comedy under Putin’s rule.
What did you think when you first heard this news about Jimmy Kimmel? What did it recall for you?
Slightly more than a decade ago, there was a spate of firings in the Russian media of more or less independent editors and producers who were one by one replaced by Putin loyalists. And an acquaintance of mine, in reference to several of these firings, coined a phrase that became a Russian meme at the time: “Links in a fucking chain.” Every time somebody would get fired and replaced, somebody would write “links in a fucking chain.” Honestly, that was my reaction. Last month, I saw that the Trump Administration declared that the National Endowment for the Arts’ creative-writing fellowships are going to be cancelled, and grants will now be contingent on writing on such topics as “Make America Healthy Again.” That to me was even more reminiscent of things I’d seen during my time in Russia.
It took more than a decade of Putin’s rule for the Russian Ministry of Culture to even start suggesting preferred themes to filmmakers and TV creators. And when they started suggesting themes, it was a scandal. Vladimir Medinsky, the Minister of Culture at the time,