Report: Jimmy Kimmel is 'Absolutely Fucking Livid' About His Suspension and 'He'll Get Every Friend He Has to Stop Doing ABC Shows' if His Show Gets Canceled

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By way of full disclosure, I'm going into this topic with a lot of trepidation. We live in an age where even the safest topic you could possibly have imagined just 10 years ago - a joke told on late night talk show - is now dark and filled with terrors. 

As hard as it is to believe, it wasn't all that long ago where network TV after the local news was all about Jay Leno reading funny headlines, Letterman sticking himself to a wall in a velcro suit, and Conan O'Brien pulling the lever that randomly generated a scene from Walker, Texas Ranger. Today, that feels like some parallel universe. And we fell down a wormhole into this reality, where a comedian's monologue delivered at 11:35 pm Eastern is the No Man's Land between the trenches in the Culture World War.

So even though the subject of Jimmy Kimmel Live getting suspended by should have an entrance that reads, "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here," I feel compelled to walk through it. If I was smart, I'd give it a good leaving alone and find some harmless story about an NFL player saying something interesting instead. But there are times the current events choose themselves, and you can't ignore the Cthulhu in the room. 

By way of background, these were the comments Kimmel made in his monologue Monday night:

“We hit some new lows over the weekend 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.”    

And the response from the media company Nexstar, which owns dozens of ABC affiliates:

Soon after, ABC, which is owned by Disney, announced it was suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live indefinitely. Which resulted in the head of the FCC weighing in and Kimmel reportedly remaining defiant:

The Hollywood Reporter -  The dramatic move follows Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr threatening to take action against ABC affiliates in the wake of Kimmel suggesting the Kirk shooting suspect was a MAGA Republican during a monologue earlier this week.

A source tells The Hollywood Reporter Kimmel was prepared to address the backlash on Wednesday night’s show. He planned to explain what he said and demonstrate how it was taken out of context.

When asked by THR, the source said that Kimmel was not planning on apologizing. He felt that what he said did not require an apology.

   

“I want to thank Nexstar for doing the right thing,” Carr told THR. “Local broadcasters have an obligation to serve the public interest. While this may be an unprecedented decision, it is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community values. I hope that other broadcasters follow Nexstar’s lead.”

Which brings us to this latest insider reporting:

Source (paywall) - Insiders told the Daily Mail the late-night host is 'absolutely fing livid' they canceled Jimmy Kimmel Live! just hours before he was due to go on air.

The sources revealed he was holding a crunch meeting with network executives, but is keen to 'break his relationship with them forever' and is already teeing up a guest slot with axed CBS star Stephen Colbert.

Meanwhile one of his producers said they were 'wandering around like aimless cows', adding: 'I've never seen Jimmy this angry.' …

A source told the Daily Mail: 'Jimmy is ped over the decision to suspend him and the show and he isn't going to take this lightly, as he is actively looking for ways to get out of his contract.

'This is the last straw and Jimmy is now looking to forever break his relationship with ABC forever.'

They continued: 'Stephen Colbert is already looking to get Jimmy on his show as a guest in the next couple days or within the week.

'Now they both are in the same predicament with being against the Trump administration … and this has lit an extreme fire under Jimmy's ass to continue to tell it like it is and be real to himself.'

'Jimmy is going to meet with the network now, and hopefully figure this out, but he is livid.

'Absolutely fing livid. This is clearly the government overreaching. There's no such thing as free speech in America, if the government can lean on companies to stop any content they don't like. …

'This is persecution, and Jimmy isn't going to stand for it. And he has a lot of friends who are going to cause problems if suddenly he doesn't have a show.

'He'll get every friend he has to stop doing ABC shows. You want to book someone on the view? Good fing luck. How f***ing dare they?'

So it's war, then. 

And war is the right metaphor for this. Kimmel and Trump have been doing battle for at least 10 years. When it was announced Stephen Colbert's contract wasn't being renewed by CBS, Trump immediately said Kimmel is next. And turned out to be right. Now Kimmel plans on amassing his troops along the border of ABC, laying siege to all their programming, and keeping all his allies from going on their shows. Good luck with that. They'd have to be better friends than I assume you'd normally find in the entertainment business if they're willing to pass up the exposure of a network TV appearance just to carry out someone else's grudge.

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But the oldest rule in warfare, from Alexander to Sun Tzu to Patton is, when your enemy is kicking his own ass, stay out of his way and let him. For the chair of the FCC to weigh in at time when Kimmel's employers are putting him in the timeout chair is such a self-own. Now this Brendan Carr has turned a questionable joke on a talk show into a debate on Free Speech and governmental overreach. Instead of everyone talking about whether a media company should allow one of their hosts to tell assassination jokes when all they're trying to do is sell pharmaceuticals to people who are awake at midnight, the subject has shifted to whether the feds should be policing what's funny and what's in bad taste. 

And as far as that last question, that's a line that humans have been drawing and redrawing since the first jokes were told around a campfire in a cave over a bowl of mastodon meat. What you find funny or horrifying is the ultimate Eye of the Beholder thing. All we can say for sure is that Johnny Carson wasn't working assassinations into his monologues in the 1960s. And it's hard to imagine that any of the Greatest Generation folks watching from their beds were demanding to know whether Johnny thought Lee Harvey Oswald was a Democrat or a big Nixon guy. 

What is even clearer though, is that just because you have the right to say a thing and the government can't tell you not to, doesn't mean anyone has an obligation to pay you to say it. Anyone drawing a paycheck serves at the discretion of their employer. And their employer's clients. ABC and Disney aren't required to give Kimmel a forum. And if they're getting emails from his sponsors saying, "Look, we just want to advertise our penis medicines to insomniacs. We didn't sign on for jokes about assassins," they have a duty to make the advertisers happy. The same would be true of everyone on Barstool if any of us post content that offend our sponsors. Who it should be noted are, without exception, the finest corporations in these great United States and it's your patriotic duty to purchase all their goods and services. We don't have some God-given right to those Portnoy Bucks, we have to earn them.

And since we've also seen dozens of other examples of famous people losing their jobs over jokes they made or opinions they expressed, it's hard to treat Kimmel's possible cancellation as somehow unique and special. Ask Gina Carano, Roseanne Barr, Megyn Kelly, the My Pillow Guy. They came after JK Rowling, Joe Rogan and Dave Chapelle, too, but all of them had the Fuck You money to stand up to the onslaught. And while I refuse to accept the FCC being involved in this, given the fact the Twitter Files proved the actual goverment was actually working to get people actually deplatformed, I have a limited amount of tears to shed about the host of a show not many people watch getting fired by his bosses.

Which brings us to what is probably the bottom line in all of this. That maybe Kimmel's suspension has less to do with Freedom of Expression than it does pure economics. As it was with Colbert:

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When you're in a dying industry, you have to be careful how you conduct your business. It's more than likely that ABC-Disney were just looking for an excuse to pull the plug on JKL, and he gave it to them. Kimmel can be "absolutely fucking livid," but he ought to first be mad at the guy who's name is in the title. 

P.S. With any luck, this will all work itself out in the best way possible. The triumphant return of The Man Show: