Jimmy Kimmel turned his Monday night monologue into a literal “gauze of comedy” after critics tried to tie a recent joke he made about Rudy Giuliani to the former mayor’s hospitalization days later.
On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel noted that Giuliani had been hospitalized in critical condition with pneumonia over the weekend—and that it didn’t take long for some commentators to draw a connection to a joke he made last week.
“When I read this, I thought—I really thought—I said, I wonder if they’ll try to blame this on me,” Kimmel said. “And then sure enough…”
The suspicion wasn’t entirely out of nowhere. It was just one week ago that both Donald and Melania Trump called for Kimmel to be fired over a different monologue joke—one that predated the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting—in which he said the First Lady had “the glow of an expectant widow.”
Addressing the latest flare-up, Kimmel pointed to conservative media figures—including a panel on Newsmax—who resurfaced a monologue joke he made last week about Giuliani rising “from the grave” and questioned its timing. One panelist asked, “Is this supposed to be comedy?” while another declared, “He’s really not funny,” calling the bit “abhorrent” and accusing the late-night host of operating under the “gauze of comedy.”
Her choice of words—‘gauze’ instead of, presumably, ‘guise’—gave Kimmel an opening.
“Right. In fact, I’m under the gauze of comedy right now,” he said, as the camera pulled back to reveal him literally standing beneath a large piece of gauze held aloft by four men donning Groucho glasses.
Kimmel went on to claim the “gauze” gave him psychic powers to predict future events. “Every day in the morning, I wake up, I make coffee, and then I look into the future to see which events have yet to occur and then we write jokes we know are going to make trouble,” he said.
He briefly struck a more sincere note—“For the record, I hope Rudy Giuliani lives another 100 years”—before swerving back into comedy with a callback to Giuliani’s now-infamous press conference outside a Philadelphia landscaping business next to an adult store.
The segment also served as a reminder that Kimmel’s “rise from the grave” line wasn’t a one-off. As Kimmel noted, he’s repeatedly compared Giuliani to a vampire in past monologues, a running gag that critics highlighting last week’s joke seemed to overlook.
Watch Kimmel’s full Monday night monologue below:
