Actor George Clooney defended Jimmy Kimmel amid accusations that the late-night host was encouraging violence with a joke aimed at first lady Melania Trump during his show last week.
Weighing in on whether Kimmel was in the wrong for quipping that President Donald Trump’s wife had the glow of an “expectant widow” just days before a gunman targeted an event the president was attending, Clooney compared Kimmel’s remark to a comment White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had made before the shooting.
“Jimmy’s a comedian, and I would argue that Karoline Leavitt didn’t mean shots should be fired. Right? She was making a joke. Fair enough. You look at that side and go, ‘Well, jokes are jokes,’” he told Variety during a red carpet interview at the 51st Chaplin Award Gala on Monday.
Before an alleged assassin’s attack shut down the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday, Leavitt joked that reporters should be ready to see “some shots fired” when Trump took the stage.
That evening was his first time attending the event as president and was supposed to be his first time delivering a stand-up-comedy-style speech ribbing the press, as is the tradition at the dinner.
Clooney did say that comments like Kimmel’s could be “a little dangerous,” however, adding how that kind of charged rhetoric is something Americans have seen “a lot lately.”
After the gunman’s attack, which authorities are investigating as an assassination attempt, the president described Kimmel’s comments as a “despicable call to violence” and demanded the comedian be fired.
The first lady made the same plea, calling the comic’s joke a “corrosive” remark that only served to deepen “the political sickness within America.”
Kimmel stood defiant during Monday’s episode of his show, where he said his crack was nothing more than “a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am.”
“It was not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination,” he added. “And they know that. I’ve been very vocal for many years, speaking out against gun violence in particular.”
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