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- Late-night show hosts sent a clear message to Trump on Tuesday night: We’re not going anywhere.
- Jimmy Kimmel returned to his show on ABC and slammed Trump and the FCC’s Brendan Carr.
- Other hosts on late-night also held the line with criticizing Trump.
The arena of late-night comedy is a cutthroat one, with warring timeslots and competing comedians jockeying for a slice of the viewership pie. But when one of their own is threatened, the pack rises to the occasion.
We saw that this week when “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” got hit with a suspension from ABC following his comments on the killing of conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk. And that happened, too, when “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” was slated for cancellation.
For a hot minute this week, when ABC appeared to cave to pressure from Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, President Donald Trump looked to be gaining ground in his war on late-night comedy. The president hasn’t been shy about how much talk-show hosts and comedians annoy him. He has called them talentless and urged their networks to fire them.
Yet they’re still here — for now — and they won’t shut up.
Late-night is a unified front
Stewart, the long-time late-night great, approached the Kimmel issue head-on in two monologues in the last week. On Thursday’s episode of ‘The Daily Show,” he put on a satire-laden dedication to America’s “great leader” Trump, blasting the administration’s stance on free speech.
And on Monday, Stewart went all-in with his commentary on Trump. In his monologue, he joked about the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, an ongoing PR nightmare for the Trump administration. Then he issued a rallying call for people to “fight like hell” to defend “our constitutional republic,” a signal that the work is far from done regardless of Kimmel’s return.
On John Oliver’s Sunday episode of “Last Week Tonight,” he acknowledged that he isn’t bound to some of the limitations his fellow network-based comedians are because HBO airs his show. The British-born comedian took advantage of that freedom to deliver a half-hour-long dissection of the Kimmel chaos.
Kimmel is “by no means the first casualty in Trump’s attacks on free speech,” he said.
“He’s just the latest canary in the coal mine,” Oliver said. “A mine that at this point now seems more dead canary than coal.”
And, of course, there were laughs as well on Tuesday night.
The soon-to-be-canceled Colbert returned to regular programming during much of his monologue. He dedicated his airtime to ridiculing Trump’s performance at the UN General Assembly. Then he poked fun at the president’s pronunciation of the word “acetaminophen” and called Trump’s claims about Tylenol and pregnancy “crazy.”
The joke train kept rolling over at “The Daily Show,” where Stewart’s colleague, Jordan Klepper, made more jokes about Trump’s joint press conference with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
As for Kimmel, his triumphant return to late-night came with its share of emotional moments. He clarified that he never meant to make light of Kirk’s death. He also sent love to Kirk’s family, as he had in a social media post that pre-dated the fracas.
Then he pivoted and threw punch after punch at Trump and Carr.
“This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this,” Kimmel said.
Kimmel added, too, that he was lucky to live in a country where freedom of speech is a constitutional right.
“And that’s something I’m embarrassed to say I took for granted until they pulled my friend Stephen off the air and tried to coerce the affiliates who run our show in the cities that you live in to take my show off the air,” Kimmel said.
“That’s not legal. That’s not American. That is un-American, and it is so dangerous,” he said. “I want you to think about this. Should the government be allowed to regulate which podcasts the cellphone companies and WiFi providers are allowed to let you download to make sure they serve the public interest? You think that sounds crazy?”
In Kimmel’s monologue, he also called Carr an embarrassment and said the FCC head’s statements about his show were “a direct violation of the First Amendment.”
It’s safe to say that late-night isn’t done talking. And with the battle lines drawn, it’s unclear how Disney and other networks with vocal hosts plan to navigate this ongoing dogfight.
Trump has sounded a warning. Before Tuesday night’s shows aired, he wondered on Truth Social if he could reap another multimillion-dollar bounty by suing ABC.
“I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do,” Trump wrote.
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