"I’m sure ABC would love it if my show appealed to everyone. But I don’t think that world exists anymore. And I’m not comfortable in it."

"I don’t really see any other path. I also think one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a performer is trying to guess what your audience wants. I think you need to do what you think is right and hope that it works out."

Said Jimmy Kimmel, responding to a question about the effect of politics on his ratings, quoted in a Daily Beast interview with the inaccurate title "Jimmy Kimmel Doesn’t Want to ‘Appeal’ to Trump Fans: ‘I Don’t Think That World Exists Anymore.'"

I clicked through based on that headline, which made me feel that Kimmel had either meant that Trump doesn't have fans anymore or that the people who like Trump are just nonpeople as far as he's concerned.  But what he means, as I read the larger context, is that TV has changed, and there are so many choices now that it's no longer the case that a late-night talk show needs to appeal to everyone. That might have been the way TV was done long ago, for example, when Johnny Carson did "The Tonight Show," but these days, taking on the limitations inherent in being likable to everyone isn't worth it.

But Kimmel is concerned about reaching a lot of people, because he explains his willingness to make fun of Trump in terms of the ignorance of the audience:

You don’t want to have to spend three minutes explaining a story to your audience. And if there is anything good about Donald Trump, it’s that people are paying attention to what’s going on in the White House. And you can make jokes about subjects that people might not have been paying attention to when Obama was president or Bush was president. Because he is such a colorful character and there is so much attention put on everything he says and does. So that makes it ideal for comedy. You don’t have to set up the setup. I’ve always felt that my job, even during my radio days, is to talk about the events of the day.

So it's not that he's writing off the Trump fans so much as he's hungry for some material that will actually make people laugh.

And this was interesting:

In 2004, you were going to have Omarosa on.... And the legend is that she thought there was going to be a lie detector test, freaked out and left before her appearance. Is that an accurate description of what happened?

Yes, what happened was, my Uncle Frank‍ lied about something. And I thought it would be funny to give him a fake lie detector test on the air, something that he thought was real. She saw the setup for the lie detector test and decided that we were going to spring it on her, which, if you know anything about taking a polygraph test, that’s not how it works. It takes a long time. There’s no ding and no buzz. It’s a chart that they analyze afterwards. So that was preposterous just to start with. But she stormed out of there and the show was live so we had no guest. I don’t remember what I talked about, I probably just talked about her the whole time. But she was very angry. And I remember thinking it’s better this way. I didn’t want to have her on the show. The woman — there’s clearly something wrong with her. And the fact that Donald Trump hired her is really all you need to know about that guy and his organization.

Ironically, her reaction to the idea of a lie detector test is some evidence that she is a liar. But it's rather weak evidence. For one thing, being asked — as part of the show — to take the test is humiliating. It implicitly accuses her of being a liar. And a nonliar could feel anxious about taking the test and the anxiety could make you feel that you would fail the test.

ADDED: At this point in writing this post, I went looking in my archive for an earlier post explaining a point of evidence, the inference about a person's state of mind produced by the refusal to take a test even where that person is wrong about the test. It was something about "the ordeal of the bier" that I used to teach in Evidence class. And — ha ha — here's the old post, from April 29, 2004, "Omarosa and ... the ordeal of the bier!" I blogged it in the very context of the old Jimmy Kimmel show!

AND: Quoted at the 2004 post:

“The lie-detector test wasn’t even for her,” a spokeswoman for the show told the Scoop. “It was intended for Jimmy’s Uncle Frank [a regular character on the show], but when Omarosa saw it, she just freaked.” Some fellow contestants have accused Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth of lying when she said one of them used the N-word. “We tried and tried to calm her down, but she just kept saying ‘I’m not going on stage with that lie detector test’ then she just walked out.”

First, interesting that the lie in question was about her saying somebody used the N-word. Second, how do we know they aren't lying about how they intended to use the lie detector? Even if they had some routine with Uncle Frank, that would have made lie detecting a subject that might be referred to in other parts of the show, an ongoing theme that Jimmy could tap. Since Omarosa didn't go on the show, we never found out, and the story that it was always only for Uncle Frank cannot be tested. Maybe Jimmy's lying.