Jimmy Kimmel Made His Return. His Monologue Was Revealing.
This was undoubtedly the most significant episode of a talk show in recent history.
By Luke Winkie, Sept 24, 2025 9:16 AM
Last night, nearly a week after it was unceremoniously suspended, Jimmy Kimmel Live! returned to television with what is undoubtedly the most significant episode of a talk show in recent history. If you somehow aren’t up on the details of this saga, shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made a shrugged-off monologue joke about how the “MAGA gang” was trying to “score political points” by painting the guilty party as “anything other than one of them.”
The comment caught fire among the Trump regime’s legion of influencers, and before long, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr was guesting on Benny Johnson’s podcast, preening about the leverage he had to yank Kimmel off the air. (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” said Carr, with all the subtlety of a stickup.)
Disney proved surprisingly pliable to those threats, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! was adjourned until further notice. After another wave of sustained outrage, this time emanating from liberals—many of whom hadn’t watched an episode of Kimmel in years but were nonetheless horrified by the censorious overreach of the state—Disney recanted again, announcing that the show would be coming back on Tuesday evening. Leading up to his grand return, after years trapped in the late-night TV malaise of stilted interviews and declining ratings, miles removed from the zeitgeist, Kimmel had become a genuine folk hero. How would he wield the spotlight? Would he gloat? Taunt his enemies? Run up the score? Take advantage of all the eyeballs on him to toast his triumph? Not really. Instead, the host made a plea for unity, after living through a news cycle that underscores just how impossible such a thing is to achieve.
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All of this is to say that halfway through the most important monologue of Kimmel’s career, he offered an apology of sorts. With tears pooling in his eyes, he announced that it had never been his intention to “make light of the murder of a young man,” and that he didn’t find “anything funny” about the shooting that took Kirk’s life. He acknowledged that the shrugged-off comment that landed him in this mess was factually off base and, furthermore, that “a sick person who believes violence is a solution” shouldn’t be representative of others.
And while the Trump administration remained a target throughout the night—Kimmel hammered the president for his two-facedness on free speech, and Robert De Niro dialed in to roast Carr’s mafioso-like affectation—he made sure to praise the MAGA allies who had offered more-tempered takes on the show’s suspension. Those included Ben Shapiro, Clay Travis, Candace Owens, and eternal Kimmel nemesis Ted Cruz. (“It takes courage for them to speak out against this administration, and they did, and they deserve credit for it,” Kimmel said.) The whole segment wrapped up with an appeal to God and a veneration of Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, who had a viral turn over the weekend at her husband’s memorial, during which she offered grace to the man who killed him. “Forgiveness from a grieving widow—it touched me deeply,” Kimmel said, choking up again.
In other words, Kimmel, to his credit, did his job. The fires have been put out. He demonstrated enough contrition about a fairly innocuous comment to extinguish the tempest raging at Disney, and I imagine Jimmy Kimmel Live! will quickly return to its previous state: a dinosaur of a television product, at the terminus of the late-night era, rumbling toward extinction. I don’t know what else he could have done, really. Kimmel needed to reassert the idea that his show welcomed all Americans to the table, and this necessitated the fiction that, in our current hyperpolarized moment, detente is achievable.
The censorship campaign is still working as intended—we just haven’t realized it yet.
So it was telling that as Kimmel pleaded for the sanctity of the First Amendment—how Donald Trump’s blacklisting campaigns were un-American, and how we need good journalists now more than ever—he ignored the elephant in the room. Is it ever OK to make a joke about the assassination of Charlie Kirk? Or the circumstances around it and the storm it has kicked up, as he did? One of the guiding inflections of the modern Republican Party has been that comedy has become far too precious, but MAGAdom, in its fevered hagiography of Kirk, has managed to make such territory totally verboten in the span of two weeks. Kimmel didn’t go near this truth, and I doubt he ever will again. The censorship campaign is still working as intended—we just haven’t realized it yet.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Jimmel Kimmel Live! returned. The opening monologue crystallized something bleak.
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