Jimmy Kimmel is back in hot water again after a joke he delivered on his late-night TV show seemed to imply that President Trump should be assassinated. Kimmel pretended to deliver a speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner and said that First Lady Melania Trump had “the glow of an expectant widow.” Making matters worse, however, was the timing of the joke- the day before Cole Allen actually tried storming the White House Correspondents Dinner to assassinate Trump. Now a call to fire Kimmel from his show has gone up, less than a year after Kimmel made jokes about the death of conservative pundit Charlie Kirk.
But not everyone is sharpening the long knives demanding Kimmel’s scalp. Jimmy Failla is the host of “Fox Across America with Jimmy Failla’, heard weeknights at 9pm on WOR; he appeared on 710 WOR’s Curts Sliwa and Larry Mendte in the Morning program to discuss the unfunny mess that Jimmy Kimmel’s Melania Trump joke created.
Failla explained to Curtis and Larry why he doesn’t want to see Kimmel’s punch line send him to the unemployment line: “I don’t agree with Kimmel, for real. If I was going to give you a serious point here, I don’t actually want him fired. The punishment for being Jimmy Kimmel is being Jimmy Kimmel… He can’t let it go, and that’s such a flesh prison to be trapped in. So, I think the comments are dumb. Obviously, I think he sets back late-night comedy because he’s an activist and not a comedian, but as I said, I don’t want them going after Kimmel because that’s such a slippery slope. If they fire Jimmy Kimmel, next thing you know, they are going after real comedians, and then we’ve got a problem, you know. Kimmel’s a joke.”
Failla then laid out the fine line that Kimmel’s brand of comedy straddles that separates good taste from poor: “Comedy really is a chance to treat people like adults who know the difference between a joke and a hate crime, but you’ve got to be able to discernably point that out with the quality of your joke writing. What Jimmy Kimmel’s doing is kind of leaving it open-ended… and the only reason I don’t like the calls to fire him is, that actually makes him like a revolutionary and his ratings go up.”
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