Jimmy Kimmel Didn't Do It
A reluctant defense of a man I find profoundly unfunny.
I’m about to say something that may get my MAGA card revoked. I’m saying it anyway.
You’ve probably heard by now that longtime Trump ally Rudy Giuliani was hospitalized with pneumonia on Sunday and is reportedly in critical but stable condition. You may also have heard that nearly a full week before the 80-year-old former NYC mayor even had a tickle in his throat, late night rabble-rouser Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about Rudy’s proximity to death. If you’ve spent any time on social media in the last 24 hours, you know exactly where this is going.
The barb was, by any measure, both unremarkable and unfunny. Kimmel has made far better efforts. He’s also dropped one-liners that should have come with a chalk outline. That’s the nature of doing a monologue five nights a week for twenty years—sometimes you’re on fire, sometimes you’re phoning it in, and sometimes you make a death joke about an elderly man who will, six days later, end up seriously ill in the ICU.
This is called a coincidence. I know we’re all emotionally scarred from COVID, but they do still occur in the wild. I promise.
It all started when Kimmel made another totally different offensive joke during a preemptive spoof of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech. “Our First Lady Melania is here,” Kimmel quipped. “Look at her, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” In another twist of especially unfortunate timing for Kimmel, the supposed punchline landed two days before a third assassination attempt on Melania’s husband.
That one didn’t just miss the mark—it sprinted past it, tripped, and took out a few bystanders. It was an objectively awful thing to say to/about a woman whose husband had—at the time—already survived two assassination attempts. But free speech doesn’t come with a feelings filter or its own HR department. As long as it’s not violent or defamatory, it’s free to be as unbecoming, crass, or tone-deaf as it likes. That part is baked right into the Constitution.
Kimmel later said the widow remark was obviously a swipe at the first couple’s age difference. The Trumps weren’t laughing. Melania condemned the jab as “hateful and violent rhetoric;” Trump dubbed it a “despicable call to violence” and demanded that Disney/ABC fire him immediately. (In what was surely another coincidence, the FCC ordered a review of all ABC station licenses within days.) Meanwhile, Giuliani took to his podcast to call Kimmel “one of the most distasteful human beings in this country” and “an incompetent jackass.”
And then everybody sort of forgot about it and moved on.
Hahahahaha just kidding. That’s when Kimmel doubled down.
“So last night, America’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, rose from the grave to weigh in on the ongoing drama involving me,” Kimmel said during the April 28 episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! “I have to say, it’s confusing to be called an incompetent jackass by a man who accidentally held a press conference outside a dildo store, who doesn’t seem to have any understanding of when videos are running and when they aren’t, and has a gallon of squid ink dribbling off the top of his head.”
Was it nice? No. Was it amusing? Only if your bar for hilarity hovers somewhere around plastic dog poop. Was it fair? Largely yes. Because if the rule is “humor becomes unacceptable if something bad happens later,” then no joke is safe—just temporarily pending.
I say this as someone who finds Kimmel about as entertaining as an ingrown toenail and who has not forgotten the comic’s inflammatory comments in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. When Kimmel was put on immediate suspension for those remarks, I said this:
“I’ll point out for my progressive friends that the First Amendment ensures that the government can’t lock you up for saying something they don’t like; it does not promise you there won’t be societal, financial, or professional consequences for being a schmuck (see: Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Roseanne Barr, Kanye West, et al.).”
You can etch those words into my gravestone.
There’s a difference, though, between holding someone accountable for what they say and demanding retribution for something that was mostly benign when it was said. (And to be clear, there wasn’t a single breathless news headline or X post about the Giuliani dig until he was hospitalized.) One is free speech working exactly as intended; the other is frankly a bit unhinged. And the backlash against Kimmel right now is firmly in the second category. The man mocks people for a living. Sometimes the universe has terrible timing. These things can coexist.
Here’s the part that might not win me any popularity contests: Kimmel is allowed to make the jokes. All of them. Even the tasteless ones. Even the ones about people we like, people who are sick or might be next month or next year, people whose only crime was being famous while Kimmel had five minutes to fill. That is precisely what free speech means. It does not mean “you may spew forth with any utterances I personally find acceptable.” Like it or not, it means “words that make me want to punch someone in the throat get to exist.”
Because the alternative—deciding which jokes are permitted based on whether the subject is currently under medical care, in power, or on “our side”—is a slippery slope. When we cheer for the government to come down hard on speech we hate, we’re handing someone else the keys to a car we may very much want to drive someday. And the people who get to decide what’s too offensive are never permanently our people. That’s not hypothetical. It’s history.
Former FBI Director James Comey recently posted a picture of some seashells arranged in a pattern that was about as ambiguous as a middle finger at a funeral. The post should have been met with an eyeroll—not a grand jury. But the DOJ actually indicted him over it, which is absurd and embarrassing for this administration, in my opinion. To clarify, I wasn’t a fan of the post. I thought it was classless and petty and obviously meant to trigger Trump and his supporters. (Well done, sir!) But I do love me some First Amendment, which means I believe Comey gets to post his little shell photos, Kimmel gets to make his little grave jokes, and we get to think both of them are tacky asshats and say so loudly and then move on with our lives.
What we don’t get to do is time-travel back to last week to declare a perfectly mediocre wisecrack sinister in light of brand new circumstances. It would be like calling your bookie to cancel a losing bet after the game is already over. That’s not really how these things work.
Get well soon, Rudy. I hope you’re back at the mic calling Kimmel a jackass soon. Because he is one, and you have every right—literally—to say so.
LMK what you think in the comments! I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to my death your right to say it. :)
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Voted unsure;
Kimmel is not a comic.
He won't apologize.
Suspension boosts ratings.
He cannot be deported.
The best way, is to never watch.
He's entitled to his opinion.
No one is compelled to care...
Sadly, Jimmy’s actual stats show that he should have been replaced long ago, but because the talent pool on the left is so shallow, he represents the best of the best for them, so they run with it.