Jimmy Kimmel returned to late-night TV with tears, laughs and plenty of clear words about President Donald Trump and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.
Kimmel, who was suspended “indefinitely” by ABC last week, was back on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Tuesday night.
“He did his best to cancel me,” Kimmel said of Trump. “Instead, he forced millions of people to watch the show. That backfired bigly. He might have to release the Epstein files to distract us from this now.”
Despite his recent suspension, Kimmel did not go soft on Trump.
“The president of the United States made it very clear he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here fired from our jobs. Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke,” he said.
“He was somehow able to squeeze (Stephen) Colbert out of CBS, then he turned his sights on me, and now he’s openly rooting for NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers and the hundreds of Americans who work for their shows who don’t make millions of dollars. And I hope that if that happens, or if there’s even any hint of that happening, you will be 10 times as loud as you were this week.”
Kimmel talked about threats not just to late-night TV hosts but also to journalists, including those covering the Pentagon, who have recently faced more threats through a policy requiring that media not publish information not approved for release by the government.
“They want to pick and choose what the news is,” Kimmel said of the government (see clip below). “I know that’s not as interesting as muzzling a comedian, but it’s so important to have a free press and it is nuts that we aren’t paying more attention to it.”
The late-night host was visibly emotional as he returned to a roar of applause and standing ovation and chants of “Jimmy! Jimmy!” from the audience.
“Anyway, as I was saying before I was interrupted …” Kimmel began. “If you’re just joining us, we are preempting your regularly scheduled encore episode of ‘Celebrity Family Feud’ to bring you this special report.
“I’m not sure who had a weirder 48 hours,” he said. “Me or the CEO of Tylenol.”
A job offer and praise for Ted Cruz
Kimmel said the time between his suspension and return has been “overwhelming.”
He started by thanking all the people who reached out and supported him.
They included many current and former late-night hosts — Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, Arsenio Hall, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Chelsea Handler and Jay Leno — along with comedians like Wanda Sykes and Kathy Griffin and even the person who fired him from his first radio job.
He was also grateful for support from his “boyhood idols” David Letterman and Howard Stern.
Kimmel, who has hosted his ABC show since 2003, said he even received a job offer from a German late-night host.
“This country has become so authoritarian, the Germans are like ‘come here,’” he said.
Kimmel turned to the audience and thanked them, too, for making their voices heard so his could be heard, too, he said. Many viewers canceled their Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions after Kimmel was suspended.
“Maybe most of all, I want to thank the people who don’t support my show or what I believe, but support my right to share those beliefs anyway,” Kimmel said, listing the names of right-wing commentators and politicians, including Sen. Ted Cruz.
Cruz had said he was “thrilled” that Kimmel was fired, but opposed the muzzling of a comedian because of what it means for free speech at large.
“I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but Ted Cruz is right,” Kimmel said. “I mean, think about it, if Ted Cruz can’t speak freely, then he can’t cast spells on the Smurfs.”
A tearful moment
Kimmel acknowledged the weight of his Tuesday monologue and the many expectations placed on what he would say.
“The truth is, I don’t think what I have to say is gonna make much of a difference,” he said. “If you like me, you like me. If you don’t, you don’t. Look, I have no illusions about changing anyone’s mind.”
Kimmel’s suspension at ABC and parent company Disney was preceded by attacks and criticism from Trump and Carr along with Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group, the owners of ABC affiliates across the country who have removed the late-night show from their programming.
The criticism was in response to comments Kimmel made on his Sept. 15 show about Republican reaction to the suspected killer of Charlie Kirk.
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing anything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel had said on the show.
On Tuesday, Kimmel’s voice cracked as he talked about the response from those critics and others to what he said.
“I do wanna make something clear because it’s important to me as a human,” he said. “And that is, you understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man.”
Kimmel noted that he had posted an Instagram message the day Kirk was killed in which he sent love to his family and asked for compassion.
“I meant it,” he said. “I still do.”
“Nor was it my intention to blame any specific group for the actions of what was obviously a deeply disturbed individual,” Kimmel said. “That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make, but I understand that to some, that felt either ill-timed or unclear or maybe both.”
Later in the monologue, Kimmel pointed to Kirk’s wife, Erika Kirk, forgiving her husband’s killer.
“That is an example we should follow,” he said. “If you believe in the teachings of Jesus, as I do, there it was. That’s it. A selfless act of grace, forgiveness from a grieving widow. It touched me deeply.”
About those ‘ratings’
Kimmel said that he receives many “ugly and scary” threats against his life because of what he says on the show.
They include threats against his family and coo-workers.
“But I don’t want to make this about me,” he said.
“This show is not important,” Kimmel continued. “What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.”
Disney moved to suspend Kimmel after Nexstar said it would be dropping “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in response to his comments in the wake of Kirk’s death.
Nexstar, which owns 32 ABC stations, wants to acquire Tegna, another owner of TV stations, for $6.2 billion. In order to do so, Nexstar would FCC approval.
Just before Kimmel was suspended Sept. 17, Carr, the chairman of the FCC, directly criticized ABC and Kimmel in comments on a podcast with Benny Johnson.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said, channeling any number of Mafia characters. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Later in Kimmel’s first episode back, he did a segment with Robert De Niro, who played a mysterious thuggish figure working as the new FCC boss.
Carr’s comments arrived after Trump had called for Kimmel to be fired, just as he had called for Stephen Colbert to be fired at “The Late Show.”
In July, CBS and Colbert announced that his late-night show would be ending next year.
READ MORE: ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ is ending. In shock move, so is the late-night franchise.
That decision was made while CBS parent company Paramount was in the middle of a since-completed merger with the company Skydance, which also required FCC approval. A decision was announced to end Colbert’s show after the late-night host criticized CBS’ $16 million settlement with Trump over his claims about how a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris was edited (Montclair resident Colbert called the settlement a “big fat bribe”).
In his Tuesday monologue, Kimmel went on to say that he took for granted the right to speak freely as an American talk show host until Colbert’s show fell victim to a dimming of free speech. (CBS maintained the decision was “purely” financial in nature.)
Kimmel said government interference resulted in ABC affiliates being coerced to cut “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
“That’s not legal,” he said. “That’s not American. That is un-American.”
Kimmel said that “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” remains off the air in 20% of the country.
He gave another example of such interference: if the government wanted to decide which podcasts were suitable for consumption, so they screened and regulated them to determine if they “served the public interest.”
Kimmel also pulled up Carr’s comments from 2022 about free speech.
“Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech,” the FCC chairman, then FCC commissioner, had said at the time.
He paired them with Trump’s own 2022 comments: “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that.”
Cue a clip of Trump saying Kimmel was cut at ABC because has “no talent” and “no ratings.”
“Well, I do tonight,” Kimmel said with a smile.
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