Will Cancel Culture Kill Kimmel?
He “apologized” for wearing blackface and using the N-word by blaming the “genuine racists.”
Late-night talk-show host and inveterate Trump hater Jimmy Kimmel is feeling the heat these days because of some politically incorrect comedy skits he did many years ago. Will his luck with the intolerant Left finally run out?
Kimmel’s inconvenient past isn’t a secret; we’ve known about it — and written about it — for years. And he’s continued to get away with it, despite being guilty of offenses that would’ve cost the rest of us our jobs. What makes his latest absence from “Jimmy Kimmel Live” a bit more ominous, though, is the discovery of a particular routine in which he uses a particular word.
This, of course, is the same Jimmy Kimmel who in 2018 was pleading with Roseanne Barr’s ex, Tom Arnold, to release a mysterious “Trump used the N-word” tape. “I want to hear this tape!” screamed Kimmel. “Where is this tape? You keep saying you will! When? When he’s retired?” (We’re still waiting.)
That’s doubly ironic given that ABC, Kimmel’s network, fired Roseanne for a similar offense.
Fox News’s Gregg Re has the goods on Kimmel, and the misogyny, the religious bigotry, and the racial caricatures aren’t aging well. “Jimmy Kimmel said [the N-word] more times in one tape than Snoop Dogg did in his entire career,” said one indignant observer. “Cancel this racist.”
As Re reported, “Kimmel abruptly announced last Thursday he’s taking the summer off to [wait for it] spend more time with his family.” Our sense is that he’ll also be watching the 2020 Emmy Awards with his family, instead of hosting them.
Donald Trump Jr., for one, probably isn’t buying the “family time” excuse. But he probably isn’t losing any sleep over it, either. Never slow to take up his dad’s defense, Trump Jr. offered some free late-night programming advice to the ABC brass: “To be clear, I’m 100% against punishing comedians for jokes, even bad jokes from unfunny hack comedians like Jimmy Kimmel … but according to the left’s own woke rules that @jimmykimmel wants to force others to live by, it’s hard to see how @ABCNetwork allows him to keep his show.”
In any case, it’s not like Kimmel’s defenestration would do much to disrupt our nation’s late-night viewing habits. Last we checked, he was bringing up the rear in the ratings game behind Fox News’s pace-setting Greg Gutfeld, CBS’s Stephen Colbert, and NBC’s Jimmy Fallon.
Whether Kimmel sinks or swims, though, there’s something sweetly schadenfreudy about all this. He’s been a dutiful fanboy of Barack Obama, a champion of the Trump-deranged Left, and, more recently, a born-again apologist for something called “white privilege.” He’s also the guy who dished out this smarmy non-apology to the unfailingly decent VP Mike Pence a few weeks ago, and this blame-casting pseudo-apology to everyone else just yesterday.
This last laughable mea culpa, which couldn’t get past the first sentence before blaming Donald Trump and his 63 million supporters, finishes with a vow not to be “bullied into silence by those who feign outrage to advance their oppressive and genuinely racist agendas.”
Got that? If you’re disgusted with Jimmy Kimmel, you’re feigning outrage.
To be sure, some of Kimmel’s skits no doubt got plenty of yuks back in the day. But that day — a day when we could laugh at each other without fear of getting canceled — is long gone. In its place is a day in which mediocrities like Jussie Smollett (pronounced Juicy Smool-YAY — language warning) can stage fake hate crimes, file false police reports, falsely accuse their political enemies, and fan the flames of racial and homophobic hatred — all without spending a day in prison.
Which brings us to NASCAR, Bubba Wallace, and the mysterious “noose” found hanging in his team’s garage — which turned out not to be a noose at all. If you were just a bit skeptical about this incendiary claim before it came apart yesterday afternoon, rest assured you weren’t alone. After all, you’ve been burned by this sort of thing countless times before.