For the second time in less than nine months, Jimmy Kimmel is facing calls for his ABC bosses to fire him, and once again the calls are coming from inside the White House. Kimmel opened his monologue on Monday (April 27) with one of his patented “can you believe this is our world?” jokes in which he quipped, “You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and the first lady puts out a statement demanding you be fired from your job? We’ve all been there, right?”
Indeed First Lady Melania Trump wrote on X earlier on Monday, “Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn’t comedy- his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.” She went on to call Kimmel a “coward” and demanded that ABC “take a stand.”
Her statement appeared to be tied to a joke Kimmel made last Thursday night in a cold open in which he made his own fake version of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with obviously edited-together footage in which he included a joke about the 56-year-old First Lady glowing “like an expectant widow.”
Just three nights later, a gunman attempted to run by security at the actual WHCD in D.C. on Saturday night (April 215) and opened fire before being subdued by agents, who stopped him from accessing the ballroom — which was on a lower floor — where Trump and other cabinet members and thousands of members of the press were awaiting the annual event.
Trump also posted about Kimmel’s fake roast on his Truth Social platform, explaining the joke, and then attempting to tie it to the shooting while calling for Kimmel to be “immediately fired by Disney and ABC.“
Kimmel seemed unbothered by the pushback, explaining that he made a “very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am. It was not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination. And they know that. I’ve been very vocal for many years, speaking out against gun violence in particular.”
He then went on to note the hypocrisy of the Trumps criticizing his joke while noting the president’s long history of using demeaning and divisive language when discussing his critics, while saying he was glad no one was killed in the “traumatic” incident on Saturday. “I understand that the first lady had a stressful experience over the weekend, and probably every weekend is pretty stressful in that house,” Kimmel said. “And also, I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject. I do. And I think a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with your husband about it.”
Kimmel also said that if the White House wants Americans to believe that a joke made three days before the dinner had any impact on what happened at the event, they should look at a comment made by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt just before the dinner that night. “It’ll be funny, it’ll be entertaining, there will be some shots fired tonight in the room,” she said with a big smile during a Fox News interview.
Kimmel, you may recall, was briefly pulled off the air last year after jokes he made about Charlie Kirk’s killing, then reinstated less than a week later.
George Clooney stepped up to defend Kimmel on Monday, also noting Leavitt’s gun-related joke, according to Variety. “Jimmy’s a comedian, and I would argue that Karoline Leavitt didn’t mean shots should be fired,” Clooney said. “She was making a joke. Fair enough. You look at that side and go, ’Well, jokes are jokes.’ But the rhetoric is a little dangerous. And we’ve seen it a lot lately.”
Clooney called on the overheated rhetoric on both sides of the aisle to be toned down. “When one side is calling anyone they disagree with traitors to the country, which is a charge that’s punishable by death, just because they don’t agree with someone, I think the rhetoric is a little too heated,” he said.
Watch Kimmel’s monologue below.
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