So much for dull summer vacations.
While Jimmy Kimmel took his usual two-plus months off, the world that supplies the nightly template for comedy on his late-night ABC show did not just roll on without him.
It rock and rolled like a 7-point earthquake. Which left Kimmel with the challenge of walking out on stage Tuesday night and trying to select among about a wheelbarrow full of topics to toss up and smack around like a flotilla of piñatas.
As could be predicted from his recent comedy choices, most of these were bloated Donald Trump effigies. Though, to be fair, the former president was responsible for most of the twists and turns of the dime novel plotline of the current presidential election.
So of course Kimmel got to a roundelay of clips of bizarre, goofy, threatening, and just plain incomprehensible comments made by the former president. These included a shopping list of nicknames (a.k.a. slurs) for his opponent Kamala Harris; a warning that people can no longer walk across the street to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged, or raped; a bizarre promise to supply so much electricity that people will be reduced to begging for him to stop supplying so much of it; and another crowd size boast—this one about how Trump easily had more people in his crowd (specifically: the crowd that gathered to storm and sack the Capitol on January 6th) than Martin Luther King Jr. did for his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Also included in Kimmel’s montage was Trump talking about how he doesn’t speak badly of people… with the exception of the guy with the biggest stomach he has ever seen. (He was speaking of Montana Senator Jon Tester.) And that was indeed a contrast to former New Jersey governor (and former Trump friend) Chris Christie, who he wanted to defend against charges of being “a fat pig.”
Just for big laughs, Trump’s list included a prediction in case he doesn’t win this election: “You will have a 1929-style Depression. Enjoy it.”
Many of those lines have appeared elsewhere on late-night shows in Kimmel’s 10-week absence, but the collection all in one place was a useful reminder for just how much has changed since Kimmel handed the show over to a lineup of guest hosts.
As was the quiz Kimmel offered his audience, which should have been easy even for people who haven’t paid much attention to the news. Because it has been proved over and over that comedy writers really can’t be as inventive as Trump himself.
Still, the first question did manage to have some people in the Jimmy Kimmel Live! audience stumped: “Did Donald Trump offer assassination edition sneakers for sale?”
I confess: I had missed this one myself, though I had no doubt it was true. And there the ad was: Sneakers with Trump’s bloodied face emblazoned on the side, with the motto “Fight, Fight, Fight.” For just $299, too.
As for the trading cards featuring Trump dancing and “even holding some bitcoins”? Those made all the news shows.
As Kimmel put it, Trump has finally arrived “at the exact intersection of QVC and QAnon.”
But Kimmel could hardly run through every single development in the election during July and August without his first show back looking like a new late-night entry: Last Eight Weeks Tonight.
So he reserved a chunk of his first monologue back for one of the former president’s more recent journeys into the politics of the absurd: Trump speaking to the far-right group Moms for Liberty and expressing horror (though, in this case, extremely low-energy horror) about the way schools were apparently not only mandating gender change on unwitting students—but also performing it themselves.
“Think of it,” Trump said, “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.”
Kimmel illustrated this by citing a family he knows with three nice boys: Greg, Bobby, and Peter. One day they were sent to school and “a few nights later they come home Jan, Marcia, and Cindy. They’re girls! The school made the decision.”
Trump underscored the point: “The school decides what’s gonna happen with your child. And many of these childs [sic], 15 years later, say, ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?’ ”
This was so mind-boggling to Kimmel that he had to bring out a familiar prop, his chalkboard, so that the words could be spelled out in writing for viewers (childs instead of children included).
Kimmel did briefly make mention of Trump’s ludicrous claim that Harris was the one who treated Mike Pence horribly—“You sent an army of toothless goons to hang him!”—as well as the contrasting namings of J.D. Vance and Tim Walz as the 2024 VP candidates. (Kimmel, a vocal supporter of Joe Biden, didn’t gloss over the June debate that opened the floor under the current president. He described the event as “half nightmare, half hospice.”)
What Kimmel demonstrated most vividly Tuesday night was that any recap of this election cycle can’t possibly be complete even after a few days. So the best way to handle it, from a late-night perspective, is to just go for some of the more jaw-dropping moments and move on.
Sadly, Kimmel didn’t even have time to touch on the soaring heights of insanity represented by the RFK Jr campaign.
Kimmel left Kennedy to his colleagues, who were all off last week ahead of Labor Day. It was Stephen Colbert who really ran wild with Bobby Jr.’s latest animal crackers moment: cutting the head off a whale.
If you could stomach the details of the story about a whale head being strapped to the Kennedy family vehicle—and “whale juice” dripping into the open mouth slots on the plastic bags the kids were wearing—the laughs were enormous.
As Colbert observed: “It reminds me of the opening line of Moby-Dick: ‘What the f**k?’”
And now that everyone is caught up, what fresh new madness can we anticipate?
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