Megyn Kelly unironically took aim at Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman for having worn blackface, despite her own comments defending the act that led to her firing from NBC.
Kelly called out Kimmel and Silverman after Kimmel appeared on the latter’s podcast, where he lamented the state of the country under Donald Trump and revealed that he obtained dual citizenship in Italy—joining the club of celebrities who are fleeing the country to escape Trump’s second presidency. “What’s going on is as bad as you thought it was gonna be,” Kimmel told Silverman, as she agreed.
“It’s so much worse; it’s just unbelievable,” he went on.
Ever ready to defend Trump, Kelly took aim at the comedians on her own show Monday.
“Jimmy Kimmel amazingly still has a career notwithstanding the fact that not only did he wear blackface, he put on a fat suit and went as Oprah Winfrey wearing blackface and talked about darning socks. Like, how many stereotypes can you hit, right?” Kelly said as she played a clip of Kimmel’s Oprah impersonation.
She then turned her attention to Silverman, “Look at this,” she said, displaying a screengrab of Silverman wearing blackface. “This is so offensive, what she’s wearing. Anyone could see how deeply wrong this is.”
Kelly claimed that she was unfairly “canceled” despite not actually wearing blackface as Kimmel and Silverman have. “This is their same crew, by the way, that pushed for my cancellation at NBC just for talking about blackface,” she said. “I’ve never worn blackface. Never. Not a single stitch of that kind of makeup in my life. These two donned the absolute worst forms of it while openly mocking Black people. They’re fine. They have their careers intact.”
In 2018, while still a TV host at NBC, however, Kelly sparked backlash for declaring on air that she “didn’t know” what was so “racist” about wearing blackface. “You do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface for Halloween, or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween. Back when I was a kid, that was OK just as long as you were dressing as a character.”
She tried to reconcile her comments then to her current rant about Kimmel and Silverman on Monday. “Now, some of us had a discussion about blackface Halloween costumes, i.e. wearing tinted skin to try to look like Diana Ross or Michael Jackson, which is also technically referred to as blackface,” she said. “I think you could make a very strong case it’s not the same thing as minstrel show blackface,” she went on. “Sarah Silverman thought it would be super fun to do the absolute worst, most offensive kind and thought that would be terrific.”
Both comedians have since apologized and expressed their actions. Kimmel called his use of Blackface while portraying Oprah and Karl Malone on the 2000s The Man Show “embarrassing” in an apology he wrote in 2020. “I believe that I have evolved and matured over the last 20-plus years,” he wrote at the time, and I hope that is evident to anyone who watches my show.”
Silverman expressed similar thoughts on her use of Blackface and also having used the n-word in past standup, when she addressed the incidents in May. “I felt like the temperature of the world around me at the time was, ‘We are all liberal so we can say the n-word,” she explained to Rolling Stone. “‘We aren’t racist, so we can say this derogatory stuff.’ I was playing a character that was arrogant and ignorant, so I thought it was OK. Looking back, my intentions were always good, but they were f—ing ignorant.”
Kelly pulled out old clips of the pair in an effort to discredit Kimmel’s declaration that he’d consider leaving the U.S. altogether if Trump “goes too far.”
“He should definitely leave, but he won’t,” Kelly said. “He’s just saying that to get plaudits from fellow leftist Sarah Silverman and from people who listen to that show. He will never leave his very lucrative but loser of a show on ABC’s late night. He’s not going to abandon that because feeling important and like he matters is too important to Jimmy Kimmel. But he’s got to get stroked by leftists by saying he’s gotten Italian citizenship and he may indeed exercise it by leaving.”
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