Jimmy Kimmel is the epitome of the 'self-important' host Carson warned about

By Gary Abernathy

On free speech, which is more anti-American — being pulled off the air for a few days, or being murdered?

Throughout my high school years (the early ‘70s), I stayed up late nearly every night watching “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” on a little black and white TV positioned beside my bed. Back then, the show went 90 minutes, and while I didn’t always make it until 1 a.m., too often I did just that, making the morning get-up-and-get-ready-for-school routine even more challenging.

Unlike what some say today, Carson didn’t enjoy a lack of competition through the years. At various points in the mid to late-’60s, CBS and ABC tried to compete with Carson’s late-night NBC juggernaut. CBS launched a show hosted by Merv Griffin, and ABC tried Joey Bishop for a while and then Dick Cavett at the 11:30 (later 11:35) time slots. But Carson reigned supreme.

Naturally, the recent drama involving Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel brings up the subject of late-night talk shows. CBS has canceled Colbert (announcing it a year in advance, to no good effect) and Kimmel’s show was suspended for a few days, with few really caring outside the far-left (formerly mainstream) media, which went apoplectic and tried to blame it all on President Trump — never mind that it was really due to local affiliate stations rebelling against Kimmel’s thoughtless, hateful comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Most conservatives stopped watching late-night talk shows a long time ago. But before we go there, let’s define what we mean by “late-night talk shows.” I’m not talking about the shows airing at various times of the day or night that have always been blatantly political, like Jon Stewart, John Oliver or Greg Gutfeld. Those shows are fine, but they’re not the late-night talk shows in the mold of Carson, Jay Leno or David Letterman. The shows of Stewart, Oliver, Gutfeld and such have always existed purely to hurl zingers at political figures. They’re a different animal.

Carson: Don’t be self-important

Network television late-night talk shows as we know them began with Steve Allen hosting the first incarnation of “The Tonight Show” on NBC in 1954. He was followed at the desk by Jack Paar, then Carson.

Allen was prone to corny, slapstick-style comedy, going for broad gags with an everyman appeal. Paar was more political and intellectual (like Dick Cavett later in the various incarnations of his talk shows), but not in a partisan manner. He favored long conversations asking probing questions, sometimes with political guests, but never attacking one side or the other. Paar famously walked off “The Tonight Show” once because NBC had censored a joke, but it wasn’t regarding political commentary.

Then came Johnny Carson. For three decades, beginning in 1962, Carson maintained broad appeal across the political spectrum and amassed tremendous audience loyalty by keeping his show focused on show business and making sure to tackle political subjects with a light touch and an equal-time approach.

Carson invented the modern incarnation of the late-night talk show. After he knocked off the aforementioned earlier competitors, other attempts were later made to take him on, particularly in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. They included programs hosted by Joan Rivers, Chevy Chase, Pat Sajak and Arsenio Hall. (Even more hosts from varying backgrounds and perspectives were given shows in the wee hours of the morning following the 11:30 shows, leading to new personalities like Tom Snyder, and eventually David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, Seth Meyers, Craig Kilborn and the very funny Craig Ferguson.)

Of those directly paired against Carson, only Hall enjoyed a respectable level of sustained success, sometimes challenging “The Tonight Show’s” ratings toward the end of Carson’s run.

When Carson finally retired in 1992 after nearly 30 years hosting “The Tonight Show” (I remained a faithful viewer until the end), the fall-out from the famous Leno-Letterman battle to succeed him ended with Leno at “The Tonight Show” and Letterman (who had for years hosted “Late Night with David Letterman” following Carson’s show on NBC) heading to CBS to start a new show in direct competition, dubbed “The Late Show.”

I know from reading several biographies of Carson that his personal politics were left of center. But he knew that expressing political opinions would divide his audience. Carson was featured once on “60 Minutes,” with interviewer Mike Wallace grilling him on why he didn’t delve more deeply into “serious issues.” Carson bristled at the suggestion, noticeably agitated.

“Why do they think that just because you have a ‘Tonight Show’ that you must deal in serious issues?” he shot back. “It’s a danger. It’s a real danger. Once you start that, you start to get that self-important feeling that what you say has great import. Strangely enough, you could use that show as a forum. You could sway people. And I don’t think that you should as an entertainer.”

For years, Leno, Letterman, O’Brien (when he briefly got “The Tonight Show” and then later on his 11 p.m. TBS show) and most others followed Carson’s wise advice — again, these were the traditional, celebrity-based talk shows most of us think about when we think of late-night talk shows, as opposed to Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Greg Gutfeld or other shows that were conceived based on doing political satire.

Letterman started the political trend

I pinpoint a major change that happened with Letterman (and laid the groundwork for Colbert) during the 2008 presidential campaign between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain. McCain was scheduled to appear on Letterman’s show, but canceled at the last minute, saying he was temporarily suspending his campaign to return to Washington to deal with the economic crisis.

That night, Letterman let fly with a flurry of personal jabs at McCain. Per the Los Angeles Times:

“I’m more than a little disappointed by this behavior,” Letterman said. “We’re suspending the campaign. Suspending it because there’s an economic crisis, or because the poll numbers are sliding?”

Letterman wasn’t finished.

“You don’t suspend your campaign,” he added. “Do you suspend your campaign? No, because that makes me think, well, you know, maybe there will be other things down the road — if he’s in the White House, he might just suspend being president. I mean, we’ve got a guy like that now!” (The last comment was a jab at then-President George W. Bush, another Republican.)

Letterman remained livid and began making pointed cracks about McCain night after night in unprecedented, mean-spirited ways for a late-night host at the time. His wounded ego was on full display. The New York Times described it this way after McCain finally rescheduled his appearance:

“Mr. Letterman has not let (McCain) forget it ever since, hammering away at him night after night in a prolonged show of pique that not-so-coincidentally is likely to drive the ratings through the roof when the program airs tonight.”

Even after McCain finally appeared on the show, Letterman did not let up. His affection for Barack Obama was evident, and his liberal leanings were obvious from that point on.

CBS made a fateful decision when Letterman retired from the show in 2015. Stephen Colbert had made his name first on Jon Stewart’s political Comedy Central show, “The Daily Show,” later spinning off onto his own show, “The Colbert Report,” where he mocked conservative hosts like Bill O’Reilly. CBS knew very well that Colbert would infuse “The Late Show” with his leftwing politics, a pattern Letterman had already begun.

Meanwhile, over at ABC, Jimmy Kimmel had been on the air with his own late-night show for more than a decade by the time Letterman retired. Through his first 10 years or so, Kimmel had kept his show relatively comedy-focused and mostly apolitical. But when Trump announced for president in 2015 — and with new host Colbert beginning to make “The Late Show” even more politically focused than had Letterman — Kimmel went all in, joining Colbert in mocking Trump, “MAGA Republicans” and conservatives in general, night after night.

Meanwhile, over at NBC, “The Tonight Show” had been taken over in 2014 by Jimmy Fallon, a comic who rose to fame on “Saturday Night Live” and whose schtick to this day seems based on having the enthusiasm, sense of humor and perpetual giggles of a 10-year-old boy. Politics seemed like the last thing Fallon cared about — he just wanted to be silly — and that held true on a night when he hosted Trump.

On that show during the 2016 GOP primary campaign, Fallon made the mistake (at least in Hollywood) of treating Trump like a human being. At one point, after asking permission, he reached over and messed up Trump’s hair — a playful gesture that brought the expected laughs.

Fallon was blasted by the far left everywhere for “normalizing” and “humanizing” Trump. The blowback was so fierce and so sustained that Fallon eventually apologized, and was still expressing his remorse a couple of years later.

Trump responded to Fallon’s apology and caving to pressure from the left by saying, “He was so disappointed to find out [my hair] was real. He couldn’t believe it. Well, that’s one of the great things I got. So Jimmy Fallon apologized. He apologized for humanizing me. Can you believe it? Poor guy, because now he’s going to lose all of us.”

Indeed, Trump’s words were true not just for Fallon, but for Colbert and Kimmel, too. They’ve lost all of us — meaning anyone who supported Trump for president, about half the country in the last election. With all three late-night hosts either Trump haters or scared to say anything favorable about him for fear of blowback, Trump voters haven’t watched the traditional late-night talk shows in years — and the ratings reflect as much, as do advertiser dollars, which reportedly don’t come close to making the shows profitable.

Kimmel has himself to blame

Let’s look at Kimmel’s latest dip into the hot water of his own boiling. Last week, commenting on the murder of Charlie Kirk, Kimmel said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

There is so much wrong with that statement that it’s hard to know where to start. He belittles Trump supporters as “the MAGA gang” while, yes, humanizing the accused murderer as “this kid.” He implies that the suspect is “one of them” (a MAGA supporter) and that the “MAGA gang” is trying to “score political points from it.”

For the record, all the evidence available at that time, and even now for that matter, indicated the assassin had moved to the left politically and was in a relationship with a person who considered himself transgender — not part of the “MAGA gang” by any stretch.

But Kimmel wasn’t finished. He went on to mock Trump’s reaction to Kirk’s murder, saying, “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody he called a friend. This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish, OK?” So Kimmel was comparing Trump to a 4-year-old and Charlie Kirk to a goldfish.

It’s unfortunate that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr weighed in at all, because it gave the left an excuse to cry “censorship” when ABC pulled Kimmel’s show off the air for a few days. In fact, ABC reacted only after numerous affiliated stations announced they would not air Kimmel’s show, and after advertisers reportedly expressed concerns, too.

Kimmel’s brand of political comedy has always been of the smirking, hateful variety. His jokes aren’t funny as much as they are mean, and only his carefully stacked leftwing studio audience could find it humorous. His usual ratings reflect a show on the verge of being canceled — ratings lower than Colbert’s show, which is already canceled.

When Kimmel returned Tuesday night, he preached to us all, saying, “A government threat to silence a comedian the president doesn’t like is anti-American.”

Kimmel cried on cue (he’s good at it) and minimized what he had originally said to get kicked off the air.

“It was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man,” he said. Really? Read again his remarks above.

Kimmel said that Erika Kirk’s willingness to forgive her husband’s murderer “touched me deeply,” adding, “If there’s anything we should take from this tragedy to carry forward, I hope it can be that, and not this.”

Don’t worry, Jimmy. Erika Kirk’s class and civility is indeed what we will take away from this tragedy, despite your best efforts and those of other far-left — as Johnny Carson said, “self-important” — comedians, not to mention other hate-filled people who demonstrated on social media that they couldn’t muster a modicum of decency or, in some cases, actually celebrated the Kirk assassination.

For making juvenile, insensitive and despicable jokes about a young man’s murder, Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off the air for a few days. For attempting to engage in constructive dialogue on a college campus, Charlie Kirk was murdered. Lecture us about what’s anti-American, Jimmy. Please.