Our long national late night-mare has ended, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! is back on the airwaves — well, in most of the country. Can we all get back to normal now, please? On Wednesday, one week after his show was first suspended, Jimmy Kimmel did, more or less.
In his second show back, Kimmel got a rousing ovation and a “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!” chant a la The Jerry Springer Show. Kimmel opened with a few preemption jokes and another about fellow ABC program The Golden Bachelor. And then he settled right back in to his old schtick: mocking President Trump.
Kimmel is especially adept at that, not that it’s an especially tough task when Trump is active on social media, as he has been since Kimmel’s suspension and reinstatement.
“I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his ‘talent’ was never there,” Trump posted to his Truth Social platform. “Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE. He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative.”
“Only Donald Trump would try to prove that he’s not threatening ABC by threatening ABC,” Kimmel quipped.
“A true bunch of losers!” Trump’s post concluded. “Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad Ratings.”
Well, Kimmel certainly did not have bad ratings in his Tuesday return. Even with nearly a quarter of the country blacked out due to affiliate preemptions — protests and temper tantrums by station groups and owners, basically — Jimmy Kimmel Live! had its largest-ever audience for a regular episode in the show’s 22-year history.
“He does know bad ratings,” Kimmel acknowledged of Trump, accompanied by a chyron of the president’s poor approval ratings.
Later in the Wednesday monologue, before Ethan Hawke so rudely interrupted things, Kimmel helped Fox News Channel’s Jesse Watters investigate escalator-gate, our latest controversy in which somebody appears to have stopped a working escalator inside of the UN building just as first lady Melania Trump and the POTUS board the moving stairway. Fortunately, tragedy — in this case, maybe a stubbed toe or awkward-looking step — was averted.
OK, so maybe our long national nightmare is just getting started.
Kimmel was benched a week ago after a monologue joke made reference to MAGA Republicans scrambling to distance their politics from the ideologies of conservative pundit Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson. The remarks were interpreted by many on the right as an incorrect classification of Robinson’s beliefs and a direct or indirect placement of blame for Kirk’s murder on extreme-right politics. Sponsors and some station owners retaliated after Trump and his FCC chair Brendan Carr made their feelings about the matter known, and Disney/ABC shut the late-night show down — temporarily, it turns out — amid the mounting pressure.
Support for Kimmel (and for free speech) brought the show back in short time.