ABC pulled late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air “indefinitely” Wednesday night following pressure from the Federal Communications Commission over comments Kimmel made on the suspect apprehended for the killing of right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk.
Kimmel’s suspension comes after a monologue Monday night in which he said, “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, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” Many read this as Kimmel implying that the shooter himself was right-wing.
Late-night talk show monologues are supposed to be funny, not rigorous journalism. It’s very unusual for a comedian to be suspended because of one, and it’s clear that Kimmel would not have been suspended if President Donald Trump’s FCC had not put extraordinary pressure on Disney-ABC. (In this case, that pressure was applied via Nexstar Media, the largest owner of TV stations in the US, which announced it would preempt Kimmel’s show. Nexstar is currently awaiting FCC approval for a planned $6.2 billion acquisition.) On Thursday morning, amid mounting outcry over Kimmel’s suspension, it was reported that ABC “hopes to have the matter resolved and the show return.”
The whole controversy is a shocking turn both in the Trump administration’s escalating war on its critics and in Jimmy Kimmel’s once pointedly apolitical career. Kimmel, after all, has spent most of his career embodying one archetype: regular American straight white dude. What could be more harmless and less controversial than that?
Kimmel started his career as a comic and radio host, an approachable everyman. In his first major television role as a host of Comedy Central’s Win Ben Stein’s Money in 1997, he was the audience surrogate, with his schlubby persona and his blue-collar accent an easy balance to Stein’s erudite snobbery. When Kimmel became the co-host of The Man Show in 1999, he was continuing to play the same character, only with the boorishness dialed up: leering at hot girls and circulating petitions to end women’s suffrage. In the raunch-obsessed 2000s, the crassness played as edgy: not politically correct, certainly, but the kind of thing it was assumed any man would probably do, if he could only unleash his id.
Kimmel left The Man Show in 2003 to launch Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC, where he dialed down the ogling but maintained his everyday dude persona. He also stayed away from talking too much politics. In those years when The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were at the height of their power and influence, Kimmel’s biggest running gag was a mock feud with Matt Damon. Regular guys, after all, are not policy wonks. They like making chill jokes about movie stars.
When the guy from The Man Show becomes Walter Cronkite
Kimmel wouldn’t start to get political in earnest until 2017, when his son was born with a rare congenital heart defect. At the time, a Republican-controlled Congress was pushing to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Kimmel lashed out in a rare emotional monologue. “Before 2014, if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you’d never be able to get health insurance because you had a preexisting condition,” Kimmel said, adding through tears. “If your baby is going to die, and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make.”
Later that year, Kimmel was once again in tears over the news. There was a mass shooting in Las Vegas, Kimmel’s hometown. "It's the kind of thing that makes you want to throw up or give up," Kimmel said. "I don't know why our so-called leaders continue to allow this to happen, or maybe a better question, why do we continue to let them to allow it to happen?"
All of a sudden, marveled New York magazine, Jimmy Kimmel was Walter Cronkite. In an interview, Kimmel noted that his background made it “hit harder” when he talked about politics: “To hear the guy from The Man Show talk about [gay rights] in an inclusive way — I have some credibility,” he allowed. He felt his evolution showed that “the country has come a long way.”
Kimmel, after all, was the avatar of regular American straight white guys. He was where the mainstream was. In The Man Show days, the implication was that you would have to be a humorless prude not to laugh at the joke if Kimmel was the guy making it. Now, if Kimmel was cool with gay rights and health care and gun control, the implication was that you would have to be a real heartless freak not to agree with him.
Kimmel’s liberal turn came with a fair amount of anti-Trump jokes, all of which infuriated Trump. In 2018, in a sign of things to come, Trump reportedly had his administration make repeated calls to executives at ABC parent company Disney, telling them to rein Kimmel in. Much to Trump’s displeasure, Kimmel, if anything, doubled down on his Trump material.
“Jimmy Kimmel is — every night, he hits me, I guess. His ratings are terrible,” Trump told Fox News in 2024. “He’s not a talented guy.” During Trump’s 2024 criminal trial, Kimmel made an unexpected cameo: Prosecutors entered into evidence text messages in which Trump’s lawyers fretted over Trump’s anger when Stormy Daniels appeared on Kimmel’s show. After CBS fired Stephen Colbert earlier this year, Trump gloated that Kimmel would be next.
Now, Trump has finally managed to accomplish what he wanted to do in 2018. He used government pressure to get Jimmy Kimmel off the air.
Yet Kimmel’s suspension throws into relief how symbolic he’s become. His evolution from smug post-feminist crassness in the 2000s to a sincere and outraged liberalism during Trump’s first term mirrors the political evolution American pop culture underwent at the same time. Perhaps that’s why, despite how dramatically American culture has shifted since the days of The Man Show, and despite how envelope-pushing his early comedy looks now, Kimmel emerged from the so-called cancel culture moment relatively unscathed. He’s never faced serious career repercussions for people outraged in retrospect by the Juggy Dance Squad or Hot Girls Jumping on Trampolines. In 2020, he apologized for having worn blackface in old Man Show episodes, and that was the end of that. People have been more or less willing to take him at his word when he says that his intentions were good and that his outlook has sincerely changed.
Instead, the thing that got Jimmy Kimmel right up to the edge of losing his show is that he said something the president doesn’t like. Kimmel is acting as a mirror yet again, and this time, what he’s showing us is that we are lost in an illiberal moment.
