On Monday night Jimmy Kimmel put what he called "the MAGA gang" on blast for their reaction to finding out Tyler Robinson, the alleged Charlie Kirk shooter, was motivated by his far-left political views.
Kimmel, it appeared, sought to gaslight his audience into thinking some conservative pulled the trigger.
“We hit some new lows over the weekend," Kimmel said, "with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid, who murdered Charlie Kirk, as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it."
On Wednesday, ABC announced it was taking Kimmel off the air indefinitely. The New York Times reports the decision came from parent company Disney.
Kimmel, right, is pictured with former President Joe Biden as a guest on the show.
On Today's Issues on AFR, host Alex McFarland says Jimmy Kimmel Live may have been on the chopping block for some time.
“They probably had been looking for a reason to pull the plug on a comedy show that wasn't funny, an entertainment show that was not entertaining.”
Kimmel's late-night audience has disappeared significantly, according to The New York Post. A sizeable audience of 2.2 million in 2016 had dropped to 1.5 million in 2022. This year, that audience kept getting smaller and smaller until Kimmel was blaming Kirk's death on MAGA in front of 1.1 million viewers.
Americans of a certain generation often remember Johnny Carson, longtime host of NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” who seemed to have a knack for gently needling politicians from both sides of the aisle briefly and from the 40,000-foot view.
Carson's monologues became a national barometer for political sentiment, offering acute commentary on current events and figures like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and others, but always from a position of comedic observation rather than advocacy.
“Johnny Carson would tell a joke and then do a little golf swing. He’d fiddle with some pencils at his desk. Yet there was also a certain mystery about Johnny. Watching Carson’s late night successors, the way they moved and laughed and got us to laugh seemed overly polished, all the mystery stripped away,” wrote Andrew Szanton in a Carson tribute for Medium.com in 2022.
(From left, Doc Severinsen, Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson)
Modern late-night hosts have been criticized for shifting between hard-core political takes and the more anticipated comedy routine.
The blog “Patterico’s Pontifications, hosted by Patrick Frey, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, has a name for it: Clown nose off, clown nose on.
Kimmel is the second late-night host to get the axe. Back in July CBS cancelled Late Night with Stephen Colbert. McFarland says both hosts had stopped being funny and were just mean … and out of touch with election map realities.
Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns many of the TV stations Jimmy Kimmel Live was on, has announced that most of them will be airing Charlie Kirk's memorial service from Arizona in Kimmel's time slot.
“Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, in just constantly mocking Trump and conservatism … this is the vast majority of the American electorate (they were mocking). I guess it’s just a math problem.”
