Kimmel Shrugs Off Senate’s Grilling of FCC Chair, Says Freedom of Speech Is Still at Risk

Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday evening shared his thoughts on FCC chair Brendan Carr‘s testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee, earlier that day.

Carr, and to a much smaller to degree FCC commissioners Olivia Trusty and Anna Gomez (the lone Democrat of the three), faced questions from senators about their office’s role in nudging ABC affiliates to temporarily take Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air in mid-September.

As LateNighter detailed earlier today, Carr diligently stuck to a script, asserting that his job as FCC chair is to protect the “public interest standard” that Congress put into law. Even when Democrat (and only Democrat) senators repeatedly asked about the gangster-like language he used on a September 17 podcast—Carr warned that the FCC and ABC “can do this the easy way or the hard way”—the President Donald Trump ally ignored, again and again, the suggestion that his actions were “inappropriate.”

“In the end,” Kimmel observed during his Wednesday monologue, “none of the Republicans confronted the commissioner in any way, no one admitted to anything, nothing was done to prevent it from happening again, no one was held accountable… and your freedom of speech is only guaranteed depending on what you have to say.”

With Republican senators largely ignoring the issue and asking about other topics, “It was not the bipartisan effort we might have expected,” Kimmel sighed.

Kimmel, though, did get support from Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who reiterated his September stance that FCC chair Carr’s choice of words on Benny Johnson’s podcast was “dangerous as hell” and “right out of Goodfellas.”

Except, Kimmel then was hit with a dig by the same Cruz, who declared while opening the hearing, “Jimmy Kimmel is angry, overtly partisan, and profoundly unfunny.”

“Ah! There’s my old ball of expired mayonnaise!” laughed Kimmel in response to the Cruz clip. “I have to say, ‘profoundly unfunny’ hurts my feelings. I would never say he isn’t funny. I think he’s very funny.

“He was funny when he jetted off to Cancun during that snowstorm” that in February 2021 left millions in Texas without power and water,” Kimmel quipped. “It was funny when he liked that stepmom porn on 9/11,” on the tragedy’s anniversary in 2017. “He does a lot of funny stuff!”