Long before his comments about the shooting dead of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and its aftermath saw him banished from the airwaves in the US, the career of talk show host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel had been a highlights reel of controversies. He infamously rained on Ireland’s Oscar parade in 2023 with a succession of boorish gags about Paul Mescal and Colin Farrell and their fellow Irish nominees.
“Five Irish actors are nominated tonight, which means the odds of another fight on stage just went way up,” he said while hosting the ceremony, in reference to Will Smith having slapped Chris Rock the previous year. He later acknowledged the quip had not gone down well, though he appeared genuinely baffled that anyone would take offence at his ethnic humour.
“I said something about Irish people drinking – my dad is Irish, this is not something I imagined would come off as racist, but to certain people, it did,” he told the LA Times. “I tried that joke out 40 different times with 40 different people, and no one ever raised that red flag… I should say, the green flag.”
Kimmel’s father was actually an IBM executive from New York, and Jimmy grew up in Brooklyn, a long way from Donald Trump’s heartland. Just how far he is from Maga [Make America Great Again] America was underlined this week when he spoke about the reaction to the death of conservative influencer Kirk, suggesting the killing had been hijacked by America’s far right.
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“The Maga gang [is] desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” he said during his regular monologue at the start of his ABC talk show, Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Monday.
He went on to mock footage in which Trump said he was “very good” after the death of Kirk, and then talked about the new ballroom he was installing in the White House. “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
Kimmel (57) has been placed on indefinite leave by ABC (owned by Disney) after the comments, prompting a debate about freedom of speech in America and whether the land of the free is descending into a dystopia. How Kimmel feels about all this is a matter of conjecture - but it certainly isn’t the first time he has been in the spotlight.
Kimmel was the Oscars host at the shambolic 2017 ceremony in which La La Land was mistakenly named Best Picture, at the expense of Moonlight.
“Guys, this is very unfortunate. What happened?” he said as madness descended and the world gasped. “I would like to see you get an Oscar, anyway. Why can’t we just give out a whole bunch of them?”
It was hardly the second coming of Oscar Wilde. Still, Kimmel was in the middle of an unprecedented public relations disaster and was widely praised for maintaining a semblance of decorum amid the chaos.
On other occasions, though, the former altar boy has found himself the target of criticism. He started his career hosting a gonzo radio show in Seattle, but was fired after mocking the owner of a local baseball club, who immediately pulled $80,000 worth of advertising.
He went on to work for sports network ESPN, where he would perform comedy segments during their NFL coverage. This brought him to the attention of late night presenter David Letterman, who had him deliver stand-up on his talk show. In 2003, ABC debuted Jimmy Kimmel Live! – which had a shaky start when Kimmel insisted the audience be furnished with free alcohol, and one attendee threw up in the vicinity of a studio executive.
In those early days, his humour had a boorish, lowest-common-denominator quality, and he has subsequently apologised for appearing in blackface.
He was also accused of outright sexism by actor Megan Fox, who said he had dragged her through a “horrendous, patriarchal, misogynistic hell”. This was after a 2009 interview in which she talked about being required to dance in a bikini under a waterfall for Bad Boys II, when she was a teenager.
She said, “At 15, I was in 10th grade. So that’s sort of a microcosm of how [director Michael] Bay’s mind works.” Kimmel replied: “Yeah, well, that’s really a microcosm of how all our minds work, but some of us have the decency to repress those thoughts and pretend that they don’t exist.”
Kimmel has previously been a vocal critic of Trump. He described Trump’s election win last year as “terrible” and said it could negatively impact democracy.
It has certainly had a dire effect on the great American institution that is the late night talk show. Kimmel’s suspension follows the announcement that another trenchant Trump nay-sayer, Stephen Colbert, is to have his talk show cancelled.
Colbert has vowed to go down fighting and has been ever more explicit in his broadsides against Trump. Whether Kimmel will have an opportunity to do likewise remains to be seen. As of now, nobody – Kimmel least of all perhaps – knows when he will next be on our screens.
