When Donald Trump decides who can laugh when and why: The abrupt from the late night talker Jimmy Kimmel shows that humor is now even censored in America.
Jimmy Kimmel is gone. His broadcaster ABC puts off his famous late night show. With immediate effect, indefinitely. Not because of quotas. Not because of a scandal, but because he said the wrong time at the wrong time – and because ultimately Donald Trump decided that Kimmel’s humor simply didn’t suit him. In America, laughter ends in 2025 where the President’s skin becomes thin.
Admittedly, the connection is a bitter. In Jimmy Kimmel’s show, as so often these days, Charlie Kirk was murdered. That Christian nationalist activist and tight trump allies. The pictures from the crime scene at the University in Utah are terrible. It is in no way a moment in which you should feel a laugh.
The comedians’ statements can be felt as tasteless. Kimmel said: “We reached new low points at the weekend when the Maga gang tried desperately to present this child that Charlie Kirk murdered as something other than one of them and did everything possible to take a point with it.”
At least part of it is actually true: the Maga camp, especially the American president, tried feverishly from the start to attach the crime of political left. They have not been speaking of a single offender for days, but partly of an entire network of middlers who are responsible for the murder.
You certainly don’t have to call an adult perpetrator as a “child”. That sounds like a questionable trivialization. But what Kimmel immediately assumed was that he had claimed that Kirk’s murderer was a Maga supporter. There is no need for this reading of his sentence, but you have to want to read it that way. But strictly speaking, Kimmel did not clearly claim this in his short monologue. If the ambiguity had been wanted, this testifies to sophistication. One reason to cancel Kimmel because of that is not.
Especially since the much larger punch line did not come from Kimmel, but of all people from the President himself. Kimmel showed a video sequence in which Trump was asked by a reporter in front of the White House how he was doing after the murder of his friend Charlie Kirk. Trump just answered: “Pretty good”.
