Jimmy Kimmel finds it "unsettling" that "our first trillionaire, the richest man in the world, is also one of the weirdest people we've ever seen on this planet."

"This obscenely wealthy weirdo has the ability and means to blow up the moon if he chooses and also to put a lot of other people's money in his pockets. You know, SpaceX, it will enter the stock market so highly valued a lot of 401ks will get triggered to invest in it automatically.... Wasn't he supposed to be going to Mars? Can't we chip in to help speed that up? It's a trillion dollars. It's hard for our brains to conceptualize that. I mean, we know trillion is a number, but it's so large... we can't fathom it. The same way we know like Elon has a lot of kids, but we can't fathom him getting laid, right?"

Expressing contempt for Musk because you see him as weird — and unfuckable — reads as a careless cruelty against people who are on the autism spectrum.

Musk came out very openly — 5 years ago — as a person with Asperger's syndrome:

ADDED: Remember when the Democrats' chose their candidate for Vice President based on his use of "weird" as an insult against Trump? They seemed to really think that could win the election.

"Our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow," Jimmy Kimmel joked.

He was doing a routine on his show last Thursday, anticipating Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner and playing the part of an emcee at that dinner. Of course, he didn't know that there would be an assassination attempt that night.

See "Melania Trump blasts ‘coward’ Jimmy Kimmel over ‘hateful’ monologue delivered days before WHCD shooting" (NY Post).

Kimmel has apologized — remember when he apologized for joking about the assassination of Charlie Kirk — and even taken some responsibility:

"Why everything is ‘aesthetic’ to Gen Z and Alpha/'Aesthetic' is now an adjective and a one-word compliment. Why does it still sound wrong to older ears?"

That headline at the Washington Post sent me right to the OED to see when "aesthetic" first became an adjective. 

The relevant meaning is "Of a thing: in accordance with principles of artistic beauty or taste; giving or designed to give pleasure through beauty; of pleasing appearance." The OED traces that back to the 1800s:

"I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now..."

"... because his audience is GONE, and his 'talent' was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE. He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers! Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad Ratings."

Writes Donald Trump, at Truth Social.

It's hard to believe the President of the United States writes things like that and publishes them, but this is where we are.

MEANWHILE:

Go to 5:42 for the part about Ted Cruz. Go to 6:34 for the denial of any "intention to make light of the murder of a young man."

Once more, I am the only martyr..."

"... in late night."

I would have advised Steven Colbert against using the word "martyr."

It is — at least for some of us — too evocative of the loss of Charlie Kirk. Why wouldn't you notice? Or did you notice and intend to make sport of it?

The OED has this as the oldest meaning of the English word "martyr":

"Jimmy Kimmel Returns: ABC Ends Suspension Starting Tuesday."

Variety reports.

Good! Glad to hear it. Un-martyr the man and put him back in the position that fits him, an ordinary host of a old-fashioned late-night show who might occasionally say something in slightly poor taste. 

"I've been a little bit divisive in the sense that I've been hitting people pretty hard — a little bit, yeah."

Said Donald Trump, on December 17, 2015 — with Jimmy Kimmel, in happier times:

And here's Bill Maher, last night, commenting on the hard hit against Jimmy Kimmel:

Roseanne laughs.

pic.twitter.com/H8FnW46dNN

— Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) September 18, 2025

"This is the product of a bunch of hacky bad millennial writers sitting around in a room trying to think of something quirky that two Gen X past their prime comedians can do to appeal to Zoomers on TikTok, even though their actual audience is baby boomers."

Said Matt Walsh, on his podcast yesterday, trashing a Jimmy Fallon "Tonight Show" sketch:

 

And I liked this — at 00:30:32 in the link above — about cancellation of Stephen Colbert's show: "There's a lot of speculation that Colbert got canned by CBS for criticizing Trump too much, which is, I mean, total nonsense.... If you're firing somebody because you don't like what they're saying... you're not gonna give them another year on the air... to, you know, with nothing to lose... to continue criticizing Trump. It doesn't make a lot of sense." 

Giving Colbert 10 more months to speak seems to mean that CBS is not trying to silence him and probably is cancelling him for the reason it's giving: money. I would add that it also seems to mean that it wants even more speech from Colbert — much harsher, more aggressive attacks on Trump. CBS lit a fire under Colbert and turned him loose to express himself without the need to preserve the show.

That prompted me to prompt Grok like this: What are some movies where a character finds out he has only a short time left to live and because of the awareness of his compressed life span, he finds far greater meaning tha[n] had been available to him when he was rolling along living life as if death was only vaguely hovering about in the fog of the seemingly distant future? Obviously, there's "Ikiru." There's "Dark Victory." But there must be a thousand. Help me expand this list. (Grok's answer.)

In short — in jort — I think CBS wants the opposite of silence from Colbert. It wants bigger, broader, more stabbingly painful satire... even as it also must stop hemorrhaging money.

"The F.B.I.’s increasingly pervasive use of the polygraph, or a lie-detector test, has only intensified a culture of intimidation."

"Mr. Patel has wielded the polygraph to keep agents or other employees from discussing a number of topics, including his decision-making or internal moves. Former agents say he is doing so in ways not typically seen in the F.B.I.... Jim Stern, who conducted hundreds of polygraphs while an F.B.I. agent, said... that if someone violated policy, the F.B.I. could polygraph them. But if an agent who legitimately talked to the news media in a previous role had to take one, he said, 'that’s going to be an issue.' 'I never used them to suss out gossip,' he said. At a recent meeting, senior executives were told that the news leaks were increasing in priority — even though they do not involve open cases or the disclosure of classified information. Former officials say senior executives, among others, were being polygraphed at a 'rapid rate.' In May, one senior official was forced out, at least in part because he had not disclosed to Mr. Patel that his wife had taken a knee during demonstrations protesting police violence...."

From "Unease at F.B.I. Intensifies as Patel Ousts Top Officials/Senior executives are being pushed out and the director, Kash Patel, is more freely using polygraph tests to tamp down on news leaks about leadership decisions and behavior" (NYT).

I've made a new tag — "lie detector" — and gone back and applied it to old posts. Interesting to see how many times the topic has come up:

April 2004: "[E]ven if the lie detector was not to be used on [Omarosa], and, indeed, even if lie detector tests are not reliable, if she believed it was to be used on her and believed it was reliable, her running off at the sight of it is some evidence that she had lied in her accusation about the other contestant....."

April 2005:  "Everyone on TV was into analyzing why [the groom-to-be of the Runaway Bride] would take a private lie detector test, but wanted special conditions before he'd take the police test. He wanted it videotaped, and the police refused...."

July 2005: "Some researchers attached sensors to 101 penises and then showed the possessors of these penises either all-male or all-female porn movies. It was kind of a lie detector test, because the men had all professed to being heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual...."

October 2008: Ashley Todd, the woman who claimed a black man had carved the letter "B" on her face.

June 2012: "'$1.1 million-plus Gates grants: "Galvanic" bracelets that measure student engagement.'... [I]sn't this basically a lie detector? And if so, won't students train themselves to fool the authorities?"

April 2013:

"I'm not the most famous person in the world, but let me tell you something — all the Trumpers know me from the head picture."

"They all know me. They all know my face. They all know my hair. So O'Donnell goes, "No, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, this is my best friend Kathy Griffin,' and I just looked at the guy and I went like this, and then he knew, oh he knew...."

It's long, but the lengthiness is the style. There's a party at Paris Hilton's house, Kathy runs into The Rock and says "Hi, The Rock," a conservative mistakes Rosie O'Donnell for Roseanne Barr. It's worth it every step of the way and it's worth it to watch until you get to "I went like this," which is, obviously, a visual. Very funny!

"Kimmel playing dead on the ground right next to a black woman accepting her rightful place in the future of tv is such a stinging metaphor."

Somebody tweeted, quoted in "Emmys: Jimmy Kimmel Lying Onstage During Quinta Brunson’s Speech Spurs Backlash/The late-night host pretended to be passed out throughout the 'Abbott Elementary' star's big moment, which a number of social media users found disrespectful" (Hollywood Reporter).

Are you following the latest awards-show racial brouhaha? Apparently, Jimmy Kimmel committed to a comic routine — that he would fake being dead drunk and pulled onto the stage by his foot and then, at the end of the presentation and thank-you speech, dragged off — and the award was won by a black woman. So he lay there at her feet while she had her moment, and that was deemed disrespectful by people who were looking for something to talk about. 

It's hard to do comedy when earnest honoring is the order of the day. But it was an award for best writing in a comedy series — so the subject was comedy. Yet, because a black person was honored, we're told (by some people), comedy was inappropriate. Is that what black people involved in comedy want for themselves? Jimmy Kimmel had himself dragged across the floor. He abased himself utterly. And still, it's not enough. It's wrong. He'll have to apologize now, according to the norms of the Era of That's Not Funny.

"Jimmy Kimmel aired edited video that falsely claimed Pence carried empty boxes."

No better metaphor.

I can think of no better metaphor for this presidency than Donald Trump not wearing a face mask to a face mask factory while the song “Live and Let Die” blares in the background. pic.twitter.com/mJzU1HW7HA

— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) May 5, 2020

He wore goggles. To keep his tears off you.

ADDED:

What does it matter to you?
When you got a job to do
You got to do it well
You got to give the other fellow hell...

I don't think this is the way to appeal to Mitt Romney.

#MittOrGetOffThePot is trending on Twitter. He's such a prim man, and you're associating his name with shit.

I think I see what happened...

@MittRomney @mittromney_sen you heard Jimmy Kimmel... be our hero! We need a few good men/women to do the right thing. Let's hear from the witnesses!#MittOrGetOffThePot#MittOrGetOffThePot #FairTrial

— Crystal Bates (@CrystalBates) January 29, 2020

Jimmy Kimmel made a joke? Oh, no... only in the sense that Jimmy made that joke 8 years ago. See "Jimmy Kimmel Got Through His Correspondent's Dinner Routine Without Dying, But Just Barely" (April 28, 2012, Business Insider):

He made jokes about the Secret Service, Kim Kardashian, Lindsey Lohan, Chris Christie's weight, and how Obama isn't going to win re-election. But they were hardly anything memorable about them.

Some lines just totally bombed, and you could tell Jimmy knew they would, the way he rushed through them.

Directed at Gingrich, "Why are you waiting until Tuesday to drop out. It's time to Mitt or get off the pot."

Groan.

A joke that was notably bad 8 years ago — when the upcoming election was just about whether to keep that nice man Obama or not — has been revived in the context of impeaching that horrible man Trump because we — some of us — are just too distraught to wait a few months for the election.

Maybe Kimmel revived his bad joke last night and got Twitter going down this excrement-laden path.

The NYT collects late-night TV-talk-show jokes about Trump's unannounced visit to Walter Reed hospital for what was said to be "phase 1" of his annual physical.

Here's the link to the NYT. I'll just put the jokes in the order that I think they're any good (and I'll leave it to you to determine if I've put this best to worst or worst to best):

“Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham later explained that Trump decided to get parts of his physical done early because he had a ‘free weekend in Washington.’ O.K., that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. [Imitating Trump] ‘Hmm, let’s see, I’ve got the day off. I could spend it with my children — not really my thing. Uh, with my wife? No, she hates me. Uh, my friends? All in jail. Uh, tell you what: I’ll just go to the hospital and have them stick me with needles, just to feel something.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT

“Phase 1 was this weekend, Phase 2 is next — was this a physical or a kitchen remodel?” — JIMMY KIMMEL

Are almost all journalists on Adderall?

Somewhere in the depths of this lengthy Joe Rogan podcast, Joe asserts that all the journalists are on Adderall. Let me see if I can find it and start you at the right point (which is near then end, after a lot of talk about the use of mind-altering substances). Okay, here:



Rogan says he watched a lot of YouTube videos of Adderall users, "who thought the whole world was against them, that they were super-competent, capable of anything. They had unstoppable confidence. They wouldn't shut the fuck up. But everyone was against them."

Then, Rogan says: "A lot of people are on it.... It's a spooky drug... First of all, journalists. I have a buddy of mine who's a writer who said almost all journalists are on it." One of the other guys says, "You get stuff done." And Rogan muses, "But it changes who you are as a person. It fucks with your head."

I like to know when someone I'm listening to is on drugs. If I don't know, and they are, they are stealing from me. That's how I see it. I'm not talking about people with a genuine mental disorder who take a prescribed drug that's supposed to get them to the medical profession's idea of normal. I respect their privacy. But somebody taking drugs to get a lot of writing done? I want a warning before I spend some of my life's precious time absorbing their addled — Adderalled — verbiage.

Searching my blog archive, I see I wrote about this subject last April, when Mike Cernovich tweeted "Yes adderall is passed around D.C. like candy, and many of your favorite journalists also do meth." Let me reread what I said back then:

I have no idea whether this is true, but I will just say that I would not watch a newsperson or commentator on TV if I knew they were on such drugs.

Ha ha. Exactly what I said today.

How did the late-night TV comedy guys deal with Mueller's vindication of Trump?

I'll try to figure out the answer by just reading the WaPo article "'I’m sorry that you’re a terrible president': Late-night hosts 'apologize' to Trump in aftermath of Mueller findings." Even though I can't trust WaPo, I don't have the patience to actually watch these shows. The headline makes me think the answer is they just came out and said I've always hated Trump and that's really what all this "Russia" bullshit was about anyway.

Okay, let me read...

... Trump and his supporters [have mounted] vigorous attacks against his critics, demanding they apologize.

During his CBS show, Colbert appeared to bend to the pressure...  “I have said one or two things about Donald Trump, like how he’s a terrible president, so I’m just going to bite the bullet and say it,” Colbert told his audience. A camera zoomed in dramatically on the host’s face, ready to capture the monumental moment.

“Mr. President, if you’re watching, and I know you are,” he said, pausing to take a deep breath, “I’m sorry that you’re a terrible president.”

Over on Comedy Central, [Trevor] Noah begrudgingly admitted that “The Daily Show” also needed to apologize to Trump. “Mr. President, we’re sorry we called you a Russian-pee-loving-pumpkin-headed-colludasaurus,” Noah said. “Portions of that name were not accurate.... It’s a little bit like coming down the stairs on Christmas morning... You were hoping for a brand-new BMX, but instead you find Santa’s dead body, burnt because your parents forgot to turn off the fire.”

To be fair, Noah is not an American citizen (I don't think). But Americans are listening to him, and he's on American TV purporting to deliver comic commentary on American government and politics, and he is communing with viewers who, he assumes, cherished a hope — a downright unpatriotic hope — that American President is in league with its Russian enemies.

Colbert echoed or mocked this despicable hope: "This weekend we received some troubling news... Our president is not a Russian asset."

From Jimmy Kimmel: "Now, the process of tearing our country even further apart can finally begin." That's badly written, because you don't "begin" to do something that you're already doing. The words "even further apart" don't save it. The sentiment is good, but it's pathetic that writers on a big network show can't polish their gags any better than that.

What about Jimmy Fallon? Does he not exist anymore? He's not in the WaPo article. I had to trudge over to the Chicago Tribune:

And Jimmy Fallon of the “Tonight Show” did have a new episode Monday, but not really: It had no fresh comedy or monologue and its point seemed to be to serve as an extended infomercial for the new Samsung phone used to shoot it outside of the usual studio.

Oh. Boring.

Anyway, these shows are awful. But I guess they're a comfy enough cocoon for some American pupae.

AND: Speaking of Christmas hopes, remember this?

"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.

"What’s the best thing about white people?"