Jimmy Kimmel was meant for this moment

Comedians will be the first to tell you that you shouldn’t take them seriously. Jon Stewart, the Walter Cronkite of Comedy Central’s fake newsroom, says so every time “The Daily Show” is hailed for its perceived trustworthiness in the news and information space. John Oliver expresses similar sentiments whenever someone praises the sound journalism employed in “Last Week Tonight.”

Even Joe Rogan occasionally reminds the public that he is, in his words, “a f**king moron.” Usually, that happens when his audience takes to heart his opinions on, say, the necessity of the COVID vaccine or the wisdom of voting for an autocrat.

Jimmy Kimmel, however, would like you to take him seriously right now. That hasn’t always been the case. Topical humor may be the bread and butter of his “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” monologues, but he’s less of a Shakespearean jester speaking damning truths from behind a buffoon’s mask than a circus clown tagging Donald Trump and his cadre of obsequious dolts with cream pies on the daily.

Thanks to Disney abruptly suspending Kimmel’s show on Sept. 17, he’s shaping up to be the most famous First Amendment defender this moment requires. Kimmel may not agree with that declaration, mind you. But in his first monologue back following the show’s six-day suspension, he at least proved he understands what needs to be said at this crucial, precarious moment in history.

From the moment he took the stage to when he left, Kimmel expressed his ideas with the utmost clarity and intention. That includes his choice to open the show with, “As I was saying before I was interrupted . . .” an ode to “Tonight Show” host Jack Paar. LateNighter recalls that Paar once walked out mid-show in response to NBC censors cutting one of his jokes; he marked his return with the words Kimmel went on to repeat 65 years later.

He soon followed that by reiterating, while fighting back tears, that he never meant to “make light of the murder of a young man,” referring to Charlie Kirk, who was gunned down on Sept. 10. Neither did he mean to imply the accused assassin was affiliated with MAGA, he added. “That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make. But I understand that to some, that felt either ill-timed or unclear, or maybe both.”

Kimmel clarified himself without apologizing, which is worth noting because that implicitly acknowledges he has nothing for which to be sorry. (Disney executives reportedly agreed, making their decision to cave to Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr’s threat of “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” especially galling.)

It was important for Kimmel to affirm his humanity before the millions of viewers who may not have watched him in years, if ever. But he also knew that casting his suspension as a glaring threat to free speech was even more vital.

“I don’t want to make this about me because — and I know this is what people say when they make things about them, but I really don’t — this show is not important,” he said. “What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us a show like this.”

From there, the host delivered a brief lecture spelling out in the plainest terms why Trump and Carr’s failed attempt to make a public example of him was anti-American.

First, Kimmel guided his audience through the hypocrisy of Carr’s actions now versus his public support of satire under the Biden administration. He similarly contrasted what Trump had to say about the importance of free speech in 2022 (“If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that”) versus his current opinion that the First Amendment should only protect those who say nice things about him and earn high TV ratings.

Which, as Kimmel gloated that night, he did. According to Nielsen, the Sept. 23 episode attracted 6.26 million viewers. Among the key advertiser-friendly 18-49 demographic, it was the highest-rated episode since March 2015. Across multiple social platforms, the monologue has tens of millions of views, with its YouTube video accounting for more than 21 million of them.

This is despite being preempted in 23% of U.S. households, in markets where ABC affiliates are owned by Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Media Group, station chains that persist in refusing to air the show.

Kimmel thanked Disney for putting him back on the air while acknowledging that doing so places the company at risk of being targeted yet again by Trump. What he didn’t say, and perhaps didn’t need to, was that it would have happened anyway.

But the most effective aspect of this monologue was Kimmel’s relatable everyman outrage. Kimmel removed the perception of late-night TV shows as elitist institutions separate from the average person’s stakes: “The President of the United States made it very clear that he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here fired from our jobs,” he said. “Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke.”

Citing CBS’ cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and Trump’s Truth Social post openly urging NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, he reminded everyone watching that the people who work for these shows don’t make millions of dollars.

Then he went to bat for a free press, pointing to former Fox host Pete Hegseth’s announced policy, as Secretary of Defense, that Pentagon journalists sign a pledge to refrain from reporting information that hasn’t been authorized for release.

“They want to pick and choose what the news is,” Kimmel said. “I know that’s not as interesting as muzzling a comedian, but it’s so important to have a free press, and it is nuts that we aren’t paying more attention to it.”

“Look, I never imagined I would be in a situation like this. I barely paid attention in school,” he continued. “But one thing I did learn from Lenny Bruce, and George Carlin, and Howard Stern is that a government threat to silence a comedian the president doesn’t like is anti-American. That’s anti-American.”

Kimmel is not entirely like you and me, granted. He’s a very wealthy man who could easily move to another lucrative entertainment opportunity pretty much any time he wants.

But it’s that fact that made his threatened cancellation more alarming than Colbert’s. “Who knew that rich white men would be the canary in the coal mine of American capitalism?” W. Kamau Bell posted on Instagram. Oliver expanded on the dying canary allusion on the Sept. 21 episode of “Last Week Tonight”: “In fact, if I may quote my ‘Sesame Street’/ ‘SVU’ crossover that no one will take seriously, we are knee-deep in dead birds right now.”

“But this Kimmel situation does feel like a turning point, and not because comedians are important, but because we are not,” Oliver continued. “If the government can force a network to pull a late-night show off the air and do so in plain view, it can do  . . . a lot worse.”

In the hours leading up to Tuesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” newscasters pumped up the historic significance of that night’s monologue, a moment he met with heart and great humor.

But he had brilliant past examples to draw upon. David Letterman was the first to return to the air with his “Late Night” broadcast on Sept. 17, 2001, forgoing his usual monologue to sit down with Regis Philbin and Dan Rather to guide viewers through their grief in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Jokes about President George W. Bush were temporarily shelved: “‘Subliminable’ is not a punchline anymore,” Jon Stewart said at the top of “The Daily Show”’s comeback broadcast on September 20, 2001, adding that it would be again, “Lord willing, because it will mean we’ve ridden out the storm.”

The next storm, the Iraq War, gave “The Daily Show” vigorous purpose as the hot blade slicing through the hawkish, Islamophobic spin originating from the Bush-Cheney White House, and amplified by Fox News.

The so-called Late Night Wars of 2010 that pitted NBC and Jay Leno against Conan O’Brien revealed yet another part late-night hosts are called on to play, that of the everyman’s stand-in. By then the genre’s decline was already in motion. But O’Brien’s ouster from “The Tonight Show” chair to reinstate Leno, your grandfather’s comic, reminded many unemployed or underemployed Gen Xers and Millennials of conflicts they faced at their recession-era workplaces, where older bosses were kicking younger ones off the ladder to survive. Then and now, O’Brien and Leno were and are both very wealthy men.

As both Bell and Oliver pointed out, that’s precisely why Kimmel’s benching, temporarily though it turned out to be, is a political inflection point. CBS and ABC were both shaken down by the Trump administration by way of flimsy civil complaints and chose to pay the president millions to settle them instead of defending their employees’ First Amendment rights, and the public’s by proxy.

The sad truth is that most people didn’t do much after that but shake their heads. Besides, both ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos and CBS’ “60 Minutes,” the targets of Trump’s suits, are still on the air. Disappearing Kimmel’s show, however, wasn’t going to go unnoticed. “They’re letting us know they ain’t scared of none of us. None of us,” Bell said on Instagram. “It’s time to come together, y’all.”

Surprisingly, this incursion moved comedians and pundits from across the political spectrum to do that. Over the six days between the show’s preemption and its return, celebrities and influencers posted instructions on how to cancel subscriptions to Disney’s streaming services. Even Texas Sen. Ted Cruz pointed out on his podcast, “If the government gets in the business of saying . . . ‘We’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like,’ that will end up bad for conservatives.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but Ted Cruz is right,” Kimmel said, making his studio audience burst into laughter.

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Viewers in markets where ABC affiliates are owned by Nexstar and Sinclair still can’t watch episodes in the show’s regular timeslot. That said, there’s reason to wonder how long the two station groups can hold out against ABC and Disney – a new Jimmy Kimmel Test of sorts. (Remember that classic bit from 2017?) Censoring Kimmel was a political activator for viewers in holdout markets who are flooding their local stations with complaints and pressuring their community advertisers.

ABC has circumvented those preemptions by making the monologues available on YouTube shortly after they’ve broadcast on the East Coast.

The lasting significance of the public outrage over Kimmel’s supposedly indefinite suspension won’t be fully known for some time, but in the short term, he’s been emboldened by public support. Wednesday night, he returned to the business of skewering Trump, referring to him as the Mad Red Hatter as he quoted the president’s posting on Truth Social: “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back.”

“You can’t believe they gave me my job back? I can’t believe we gave you your job back!” Kimmel quipped. The monologue proceeded like so for a while before Kimmel paused again to speak to whatever angry or skeptical elephants may still be left in the room.

“There are still a lot of people who think I should be pulled off the air for making fun of Donald Trump. So I want to explain that I talk about Trump more than anything because he’s a bully. And I don’t like bullies,” Kimmel said. “I played clarinet in high school.”

Maybe he still does, well or poorly. Regardless, we should all be very heartened to know that, for the time being, Kimmel has no intention of quitting his day job.