24 September 2025

Jimmy Kimmel and the decline of the American comedian

His return to air was like watching a forced confession

“Jackie hauled ass to save her ass.” Lenny Bruce’s explanation of why Jackie Kennedy crawled onto the back of the limousine after her husband had been shot and reached her hand out to a Secret Service agent is, you might say, the locus classicus of that vein of comedy – the dominant strain now – that seeks not to cause hilarity but to startle by stating the naked “truth”. It’s not clear when Bruce said it, but it was not too long after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Bruce later explained that he wanted to puncture the “bullshit” idealisation of Jackie risking her life to get help. Come on, he said, any woman with children would try to save her life for the sake of her kids, not risk it for the sake of her husband, who clearly had been killed. He never explained why puncturing the heroic interpretation of Jackie getting onto the trunk of the limousine was so morally urgent. The callous remark cost him a significant amount of public support. He died, bankrupt and alone in his Hollywood Hills bathroom, of a morphine overdose a couple of years later.

If Bruce were alive today, he’d give up heroin and morphine and shoot Trump into his arm. You can’t help but think of Bruce when you watch the clip of Jimmy Kimmel saying, in the monologue he delivered just five days after Charlie Kirk’s murder: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the Maga gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” In fact there was no proof that Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s murderer, was “one of” the Maga movement. By that point it seemed that Robinson’s motive was what he considered Kirk’s “hate”, and that he also killed Kirk because of Kirk’s anti-trans sentiments; Robinson was romantically involved with a trans person. Kimmel’s unfunny “joke” was not, like Bruce’s, insensitive. It was flammably divisive at a moment when the country was combusting.

In America today, the turmoil following a chaotic event is really a comfortable ordering of American chaos. The response was predictable. The Federal Communications Committee (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, called for Kimmel to be punished or, Carr said, the FCC would take care of the matter itself. Kimmel’s network, ABC, suspended his show, the liberal media and Hollywood celebrities made an uproar, Trump and the populist right gloated, Kimmel returned to ABC with a martyr’s energy last night (23 September) and Americans slept soundly, if restlessly, ultimately reassured that trusty sectarian lines were clearly drawn and that nothing radical had changed amid all the country’s radical changes.

The idea that a comedian would be muzzled, at the behest of the government, because he mocked the president was, of course, horrific. Trump’s efforts to bring America under the control of his will, as he dizzyingly moves on numerous fronts at once, are horrific. But in all the hysteria following Kimmel’s remarks, one vital aspect of the situation was lost. At a time when the country needs unity in order to avoid the lowering authoritarian boom, Kimmel was appealing to his base just as Trump appeals to his base. Trump, for the first time since the American Civil War, is, voluntarily, enthusiastically, president of only one part of the country. Today’s late-night network comedians are, for the first time since the true advent of late-night comedy in the early 1960s with Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, performing for only one segment of the population.

Like another Trump-antagonist, Stephen Colbert, whose show was set to be terminated by CBS in May, seemingly also the result of political pressure – the network had a pending lucrative deal that had to be approved by the government – Kimmel can be very smart, and very funny. He has some of the best comedy writers around. I happen to know one of them and he is a profoundly decent guy and, if I may speak in conservative terms, a true family man. I don’t think Kimmel, or anyone on his team, meant to hurt Kirk’s family or his followers. “Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out,” says the Fool in King Lear. Night after night, Kimmel – like Colbert – whips the sick beast inhabiting the White House out into the light of day. When the cathartic revelation is completed by the obliterative power of laughter, the result is a gratifying release. But when it is simply a shocking statement, especially if it is an untruthful statement, it leaves what remains of reality in ruins. As Kimmel coasted home after the show in his Audi, the country blew up.

Unlike cable, network TV has an FCC licence, which means that anything that appears on it has to fulfil a mandate to have broad public appeal and adhere to non-partisan standards. The precise definition of the mandate is fuzzy, but for generations it meant, in the context of network television, that the working-class conservative and the upper-class liberal often laughed at the same jokes and were ushered into sleep along the same good-natured current of harmlessly irreverent American fellow-feeling. That all changed with Bush vs Gore in 2000, when the right seemed to steal the election, and then with the country being lied into the Iraq War in 2003. Cable shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart became virtual gathering places for popular rage and resentment at what seemed a criminal, illegitimate regime. The FCC rules didn’t apply to these shows any more than they applied to the equally ascending Fox network. In the increasing pendular antagonism between Fox and, say, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report – Stephen Colbert’s first iteration – you could even see, looking back, the seeds of the country’s polarisation. But the most consequential transformation was in comedy. Taunts and partisan insults began to replace the humble joke. Laughter started to wear a jersey.

Gone was the humour of political satirist Mort Sahl, whose subtle intelligence was, by definition, accommodating to every stripe of intelligence no matter who or what its target: “Nixon’s the kind of guy that if you were drowning 50 feet off shore, he’d throw you a 30-foot rope. Then Kissinger would go on TV the next night and say that the president had met you more than half-way.” Enter the sophomoric insults of Jon Stewart: “Who the fuck taught Donald Trump about the Alien Enemies Act of 1798?” The main difference between the two was that neither Nixon nor Kissinger could ever speak like Sahl. Trump talks like Stewart all the time. In the same way, when Kimmel uttered a gross untruth about the political affiliation of Kirk’s killer, he was spreading the same sort of destructive falsehood the Trump administration, and its hordes of enablers, disseminate by the hour.

Kimmel and the other late-night tribunes are not exactly political activists. They’ve spent their lives and careers honing their craft among acting teachers, directors, producers, other entertainers, agents, managers, nightclub owners and studio executives. Perhaps the direction the country is going in convinced them to stick their necks out and risk all for the homeland. Or perhaps these figures, who make millions to tens of millions of dollars a year for hurling insults at Trump, are as in thrall to the almighty American buck as their favorite bête noire. Kimmel’s ratings among the precious demographic of 18-49 have been in precipitous decline. That happens to be the precise demographic in which hatred of Trump burns the brightest.

Again, this doesn’t mean that ABC (briefly) suspending Kimmel’s show at the behest of America’s tyrant is anything but a sign of terrible things to come. Then again. It could mean that comedy needs to be reborn in the places where artistic dissent has always thrived: the obscure corners of the culture. An out-of-the way club, someone’s apartment – some place not obsessed with paying customers, with accruing wealth and social power. That is to say, Babel, Mandelstam, Meyerhold, Otto Freundlich, Kurt Gerron, Liu Xiaobo, Li Haoshi, the tormented and persecuted Lenny Bruce – these the super-wealthy and elevated Jimmy Kimmel is not. There is something chilling about Trump’s antagonism with him. But there is something slightly sickening about the high-profile and often highly remunerative skirmishes between liberal elites and conservative elites.

For there was Kimmel last night, briefly choking up when saying that “it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man”, and then a little later, choking up again, briefly, when referring to Erica Kirk forgiving the murderer. The performance of emotion was hard to watch. It was like a forced confession – but of hidden goodness and innocence, not guilt. “Those years of insults, barbs, and taunts – they were strictly business! Behind it all, I hurt!” Kimmel hit every note, one minute reciting the names of all the famous figures who had supported him in his Gethsemane moment, and the next wringing his hands over the fates of the little people, the network employees “who don’t make millions of dollars” and who would lose their jobs if another comedian got cancelled. He made it clear that he thought Kirk’s killer was “sick” and not Maga, then added that he himself was the target of numerous “threats”. He lashed out at Carr and Trump for once advocating free expression and now trying to stifle it and then, as if preserving his brand, declared with an air of heroic defiance that it was “nuts” that people are not “paying more attention” to Pentagon efforts to curb journalistic access.

In fact, that is all journalists are, rightly, talking about. He spoke of all the “friends and family on the other side I love”. He sounded for all the world like a milquetoast Steve Bannon: “Let’s stop letting politicians tell us what they want and tell them what we want.” Towards the end of his monologue, his fleeting bouts of near-tears well behind him, he played a clip of Trump saying about Kimmel: “He had no ratings.” Kimmel took a beat, dropped the I-am-a-comedian-do-we-not-bleed-when-we-are-pricked shtick and looked slyly at the camera. “I do tonight,” he said. Trump is a terrifying nightmare, period. And Kimmel is a harmless, ineffectual, ambitious guy. But what is striking about the rotting of American civilisation is how comprehensive it is, from top to bottom, from right to left, and just about everything in between.

[Further reading: Mitchell and Webb’s second look]