The presumption that Jimmy Kimmel might be trembling in the bullseye this time, with his corporate bosses under direct pressure from the President and his wife to fire him, evaporated Monday night like a blast of empty hot air.
Kimmel, who last September proved to a lot of people who now have “cowardly caving” on their resumes that he doesn’t have that character trait in his DNA, reinforced that impression by stepping out forcefully on stage, to an especially tumultuous ovation, and doing something spectacular:
His show.
No breast-beating. No mea culpas or maxima culpas. Not even a mini-culpa.
A show; a solid, entertaining, funny show, with jokes, a taped bit, and a couple of guests who also were solid and funny.
Yes, Kimmel, who never showed how much stress he had to have been under all day, addressed the ugliness of the past weekend’s events at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and the latest Trump attempt to take advantage of that chaos to shut down Jimmy Kimmel Live—to go along with the Strait of Hormuz.
That effort started with a social media call from Melania Trump Monday morning for The Walt Disney Company to “finally take a stand” and terminate the show immediately because of a sketch she did not like. That was followed hours later by Donald Trump’s own similar demand, as well as a ringing denunciation of the host.
A “vomit storm” was how Kimmel described it on his show.
And of course Kimmel defended himself for performing last Thursday night’s sketch, the one that kicked off this latest eruption from the White House.
But he did it in a straightforward, unflinching way—no bowing or scraping, just a clear description of what was intended, which, Kimmel said, was “not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination.”
He emphasized his personal record of opposition to gun violence and expressed empathy because the First Lady had a “stressful experience over the weekend.” But even that moment of sincerity was not immune from a joke: “Probably every weekend is pretty stressful in that house.”
If you drop a joke in the middle of your acknowledgement that some level of distress was justified from the wife of the President, you are clearly not withering away under the heavy hand of management.
Further evidence: after a sincere assurance that hateful and violent rhetoric is something everyone should reject, Kimmel turned the tables with another joke. “And I think a great place to have that start is to have a conversation with your husband about it.”
And then he went on with his monologue, performing some well-written jokes that riffed on other chaotic funny moments from the dinner. It was clear these moments were ripe for skewering because a bunch of them inspired almost the exact same jokes a half hour earlier from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show (and later—much later, as it turned out—on an NBA Playoffs-delayed Late Night with Seth Meyers).
Kimmel did all of this looking totally like the veteran late-night host he is, and nothing like a whipped dog, which may have been what some had expected.
What he projected was not trepidation about losing his job, or even being suspended for a week again. He projected confidence. When he referenced the First Amendment protecting what the Trumps said about him and what he said about the Trumps, it did not sound like a defensive shield. It sounded like a commitment.
He was able to move smoothly into a pretaped “Lie Witness News” segment, a reliable Kimmel bit, with people in the street being fed fake information about a news event and testing them to see if they act like they know what it’s about.
And it wasn’t even the news event that had dominated the monologue. It was the state visit of King Charles III. The bit generated some much-bleeped silliness.
Surely the MAGA folks who had tuned in hoping to see their leader’s least favorite host melting into a puddle like the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz (the movie, not the mentalist) were tuning out by that point.
But before that they got an extra unexpected treat, something that further demonstrated that Kimmel was showing no signs of being reined in. The treat was offered for their enjoyment: a clip from 2010 that featured a prominent New York real estate developer named Trump, bouncy and eager to participate in a Kimmel bit saying, “I love Jimmy.”
The host seemed to thoroughly enjoy the memory.
Throw in a couple of unusually funny interviews—one with comic actor and frequent Kimmel guest host Anthony Anderson, and one with Pod Save America host and obviously joke-stocked political commentator Jon Lovett—and what you’ve got is a show much more laugh-centric than politics-centric.
What did it all mean?
Only that whatever the Trumps sought to achieve in this renewed assault on the First Amendment rights of a comic whose barbs have drawn blood—metaphorically only—they did not get even a shred of it out of Jimmy Kimmel last night.
Instead, he dispatched this latest career threat with what at least looked like insouciance. This President hates to lose, and he has been gunning (metaphorically only) for Kimmel since the failed effort to silence him last fall. He may keep the pot stirring.
Jimmy Kimmel’s not waiting for something to spill on him. He’s moving on.
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