Late-night hosts celebrated the comeback of Jimmy Kimmel after ABC temporarily suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live last week.
Speaking on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart recounted how ABC announced that Kimmel would return to TV on Tuesday night, noting that the audience response helped to convince Disney to do the right thing.
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“That campaign that you all launched, pretending that you were going to cancel Hulu while secretly racing through four seasons of Only Murders in the Building, that really worked, congratulations,” Stewart said. He added, “Wasn’t it interesting, to try and figure out all the tentacles Disney has in your daily life? It’s one thing to swear off cruises, but the Avengers? Nah. How is it possible that by getting rid of one company, I can’t watch Winnie the Pooh or Monday Night Football? Or listen to early Hilary Duff?”
Stewart went on to discuss why Jimmy Kimmel Live was pulled, joking that it “had nothing to do with the Trump administration and their explicit FCC threat that they could remove the show the easy way or the hard way.”
The host added that Donald Trump may need to look inward rather than continue cancelling everyone who criticizes him after playing a clip of a Fox news correspondent saying, “If Donald Trump wanted to take everyone off the air who had criticisms for him, there would basically only be a handful of individuals left on television.”
“That is funny, but it’s also maybe a cause for self-reflection?” Stewart replied. “‘Hey, if everybody on TV is criticizing me, except for like four people, and one of them is my daughter-in-law, am I the drama?’”
On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert explained that “our long late-night national nightmare is over.” “This is wonderful news for my dear friend Jimmy and his amazing staff,” Colbert told his audience to loud applause and cheers. “I’m so happy for them.” He added, picking up his new Emmy, “Plus, now that Jimmy’s not being cancelled I get to enjoy this again. One more I am the only martyr in late night! Wait, unless CBS, you wanna announce anything?”
He acknowledged that Disney folded because so many viewers cancelled their Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions. “Which explains why the other trending search was ‘how to entertain feral child without Bluey?’” Colbert joked. He added, more seriously, “So Disney put Kimmel back on because you, the American people, were upset.”
On Late Night, Seth Meyers noted that there has been backlash from conservatives as well as liberals about how the Trump administration is censoring comedians, including from Ted Cruz. “I want to say I agree with Ted Cruz and I want to say it because I feel pretty sure there won’t be another occasion to say it,” Meyers said.
Speaking specifically about Kimmel, Meyers also spoke about the “massive national backlash” to the FCC attempting to silence the host. “I haven’t seen a poll yet, but I think if you asked Americans if the president should be dictating what TV hosts can and can’t say, you’d get about 3 percent positive and…” Meyers said before cutting to a clip of Trump saying, “97 percent negative.”
On Monday, Disney has reached a formal decision to bring Kimmel back to the ABC airwaves just one week after his indefinite suspension following statements he made on Jimmy Kimmel Live about Charlie Kirks’ assassin and after a threat from President Trump’s FCC chair.
“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” the Walt Disney Company said in a statement. “It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
Days after Kirk’s murder, Kimmel questioned the political affiliation of the killer. “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,” he said, “and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
Yesterday, the ACLU released an open letter signed by over 400 celebrities speaking out in support of Kimmel. Signees included Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman, Robert De Niro, Jane Fonda, Selena Gomez, Tom Hanks, Olivia Rodrigo, Ben Stiller, Jamie Lee Curtis, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Keaton, Regina King, Diego Luna, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Natalie Portman, Maya Rudolph, Martin Short, and Kerry Washington.
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