2022-11-01
Jimmy Kimmel Lost Half of His Fan Base Over Trump Jokes
On the latest episode of The Naked Lunch Podcast, Jimmy Kimmel told Phil Rosenthal and David Wild that when Trump's popularity among Republicans started to grow, ABC executives asked him to limit the jokes about the future President for fear of alienating a large part of his fan base. According to Kimmel, ABC polling at the time estimated that Kimmel was the leading late night television host among Republicans and conservatives. When he received the advice, Kimmel claims he threatened to quit and ABC backed off. However, since that time, Kimmel claims the Republican viewers left in droves and he has since lost about half of his fan base.
That's quite the admission to make, and I appreciate the transparency. However, I think the analysis is only partially true. I suspect that if Jimmy Kimmel really bled Republican viewers as badly as he says, the Trump jokes weren't really the problem. The problem was two fold. First, and most related to Jimmy Kimmel Live, the show wasn't balanced in its humor. Obviously, the Republican candidate and the President of the United States of America is going to have to be the victim of a lot of jokes for a late night television comedian. However, when Democrats escape virtually unscathed by Jimmy Kimmel's writers night after night, Republican viewers are going to be less patient with the nightly dog pile on Trump. As it is, conservatives are keenly aware of and on the lookout for leftist media bias on the network television shows. It wouldn't take long for them to give up on Kimmel after a couple of weeks.
The second problem was Greg Gutfeld. Although his show Gutfeld! has only been on Fox News for a short amount of time, the conservative cable news network began getting him on the air more regularly during Kimmel's time slot. Even when he was just a commentator, he was good for a few laughs and, at least for conservative viewers, easier to digest at the end of long day.
Jimmy Kimmel isn't the only victim of Republican viewers leaving his show. Jimmy Fallon on NBC and Stephen Colbert on CBS have also lost a lot of their Republican viewers for the same reasons: unbalanced jokes and the rise of Gutfeld.
To prove my point about that, Forbes' Mark Joyella reported back in August that Gutfeld has led the late night war for weeks without exception at that point; and the trend of Fox News' nightly dominance has only continued.
I don't know if Jimmy Kimmel and the analysts at ABC (and presumably NBC and CBS) are just blaming Republicans for being ultra sensitive and thin-skinned, but they need to understand that the problem isn't the jokes they're telling, but the jokes about Democrats they're holding back. I'm sure they know about Gutfeld!, but they're not talking about their biggest competitor because they don't want to give him free advertising.
Republicans, despite what these New York and Hollywood liberals think, are perfectly capable of laughing at themselves. Dana Carvey's impersonations of George H.W. Bush and their subsequent friendship is a perfect example of that. What Republicans want is a bit of balance in both the humor and the respect the comedians and their writers show the butts of their jokes; both of which have been missing since 2000.
