Jimmy Kimmel hit back on Sunday after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slammed him on social media.
Kennedy shared a post from X satirist Peter Girnus, who often assigns himself different grandiose ― and fictional ― job titles, such as “senior director for Iran on the National Security Council,” “forensic accountant at the Trump Organization” and “the president of the United States.”
In a viral thread shared by Kennedy, Girnus claimed he was senior vice president of late-night strategy at CBS, and claimed he had “killed” Colbert’s previous character and “turned a jester into a priest.”
But Kennedy praised the post as a “superb dissection of the shocking collapse of liberal comedy.”
“This is the best explanation of how we’ve reached the nader where Late Night host Jimmy Kimmel can say ‘It’s not my job to be funny,’” Kennedy wrote on X, complete with typo. “As this author shows, he was hired as a comedian but he made himself a priest.”
Kimmel shared Kennedy’s post on Instagram and added a correction in pink letters.
“It’s ‘nadir’ dummy. Now get back to spreading polio,” Kimmel wrote:
Kimmel never said the words Kennedy attributed to him. The phrase appears to originate from an article on the satirical Babylon Bee website.
In reality, former first lady Michelle Obama asked Kimmel during a podcast interview how it felt to have gone from doing comedy to “probably unintentionally” becoming a truth-teller when he began tackling more serious topics on his show.
“I love telling jokes, I love being funny, I love when the audience laughs. There’s nothing that’s more exciting to me than that,” Kimmel said.
He also noted that it would be embarrassing, even shameful, if he didn’t talk about what’s happening right now.
“I’ve always said, since the very beginning ― even when I was on the radio ― is to talk about what is going on in people’s lives,” he said.
But Kimmel said he bristled at people who claimed it wasn’t his job to delve into certain subjects.
“Don’t tell me what my job is,” he said. “I don’t tell you what your job is. My job is whatever I decide my job is, or whatever my employer allows me to do. That’s what my job is.”
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