Jimmy Kimmel’s Apathetic, Insincere, and Belligerent Apology

When an Apology is Not an Apology

James Christian Kimmel also is known as Jimmy Kimmel, is an American television host, comedian, writer, and producer. He is the host and executive producer of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, a late-night talk show that premiered on ABC on January 26, 2003, at Hollywood Masonic Temple in Hollywood, California. This is how Wikipedia describes him, as a TV host, writer, and comedian. Jimmy Kimmel, at this stage of his career, finds himself submerged in a bit or two of controversy, like many celebrities with Internet history, surrounding past comedic bits that were questionable and more importantly, obtuse in stark contrast to a more sensitive audience. What did Jimmy Kimmel do you ask? Well, he has joined this particular club of individuals who’s comedic history has brought an unwarranted highlight to their past performance. Jimmy has joined the likes of Howard Stern, Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, TV Producer, Bill Lawrence, Julianne Hough, Ted Danson, Billy Crystal, and the list keeps getting longer and longer for people who’ve donned blackface or showcased it in the TV shows for comedic purposes.

Jimmy Kimmel’s transgression was performing in blackface as he portrayed the NBA player, Karl Malone. To be honest, when I first saw Kimmel as Karl Malone, I couldn’t believe what IO was seeing. Jimmy was doing a bit in blackface as Karl Malone and he was getting away with it. He portrayed Karl Malone as a mush-mouth talking idiot with no consequence for his actions. Social media wasn’t that important during that time and nothing was done to admonish Kimmel and the only thing you could take away from this is the aspect of white privilege.

You would think that this would be the only blackface Kimmel had done but I recently watched Steven Crowder, a YouTube influencer, showing Kimmel in blackface again but this time he was portraying Oprah Winfrey. To make matters worse, his blackface Oprah was standing on a Latin woman’s stomach. The Latin woman was a housemaid. So, not only did he marginalize Oprah, he marginalized the Latin woman in a degrading fashion. That’s another strike against Kimmel.

You’d think that this would be enough but there’s more arsenal in Kimmel’s intolerant comedic tropes. Did you know that he put out a racially slurred rap album back in 1996? On this album, pretended to be Snoop Dog as he rapped this racially charged “Christmas” song where he invoked the N-word throughout the song. Know you would say that oh, it was in the 90’s so who cares and Kimmel was in radio then so anything goes with the atmosphere of shock-jock sensibility. I would strongly take exception to that. I was on the radio during that time and it was an AOR classic rock station with a morning drive time shock-jock talk show format. I was the sole black person there in a sea of white faces and I was also the head comedy writer and executive producer of the show. Elevating the discourse from perceived stereotypes wasn’t difficult to do when I was there. The comedy was a lot smarter and sharper by not relying on the notion that humor had to degenerate to a level so base that it’s cruel, harmful, and hate-filled. Kimmel’s comedy was just that, cruel, harmful, and hate-filled. And he kept getting away with it.

As he got more comfortable sitting behind a desk and interview other celebrities, he saw himself being more important in social issues. He self-promoted himself to the level of being an influencer with his talk show being his platform. He could talk about whatever he wanted on any subject without any impunity. With the election of Donald Trump, Kimmel had his political punching bag and his monologue was peppered with “Orange Man Bad” shtick that it was all he ever seemed to want to talk about. For me, it was one too many “jokes” and I had enough. There was no humor, no funny in any of his talking points, just an onslaught of visceral attacks on Donald Trump. The late-night guys need to go back and look at some vintage Johnny Carson material and how he handled politicians. It was funny and not mean and attacking and filled with vinegar as these crop of talk show hosts are doing. They stopped being funny in 2016.

Kimmel has been dodging this pile of excrement his entire career. He has gone on record saying that “I have long been reluctant to address this…“ 

Unfortunately for Kimmel, he’s in the public eye now and past misdeeds become the anchor around your neck and the hope of someone throwing you a life preserver slips even further away as you drift from the shoreline. But what can a late-night talk show host do? Well, he offers up righteous indignation unapologetic apology.

Kimmel has already mastered the unapologetic apology before. In his late-night attack on Vice President Mike Pence, he went after the VP for delivering medical supplies to a Virginia health care center. Mike Pence joked about delivering empty boxes after delivering filled boxes of supplies. But Kimmel had edited the video to show only the portion where he could mock the VP. The backlash was swift and Kimmel was forced to issue an “apology”. But in doing so, it wasn’t an apology but more of a continuation of the “Orange Man Bad” tactic where he danced around issuing a sincere apology to Mike Pence.

Fast forward and Kimmel find himself having to issue an apology for his past misdeeds but once again, it’s not his fault, it’s other faults for bringing up his unfunny comedic deeds. Kimmel is a narcissist to the nth degree who gets validation from his own ego. He offers up an apology but it’s like a carefully placed field of landmines as he goes after others for, as he puts it, “I know that this will not be the last I hear of this and that it will be used again to try to quiet me. I love this country too much to allow that. I won’t be bullied into silence by those who feign outrage to advance their oppressive and genuinely racist agendas.” He doubles down and draws a line in the sand with this approach. He’s failing to recognize that he is politicizing his misdeeds for all the wrong reasons. He wants to place the onus away from him while wanting to maintain his status as “the people’s champion” in his own image. This will not go away until he strips away his ego and fully owns up to his closet institutionalized racism that became ingrained in him subconsciously. And what will his network, ABC, do?

Do they take him at his word or do they take the option of what they did to Roseanne Barr? Roseanne was let go of her successful sitcom in 24 hours. If she had bags and boxes to pack, they didn’t give her time for her to hit the door. She did the unthinkable, she commented about Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to the Obama administration, comparing her to an ape. Roseanne said she didn’t know Jarrett was black and it was a bad joke. Well, 24 hours later, Roseanne is out, the show is canceled and comeback as under a different name because the show makes money for ABC. But how will they handle Kimmel?

He used the N-word multiple times, he’s donned blackface multiple times, he’s impersonated black people in unflattering ways under the umbrella of comedy so how can ABC justify firing Roseanne while keeping Kimmel? Kimmel’s misdeeds are more serious than Roseanne, from this perspective. I do understand and get youthful indiscretions and saying bad jokes that are in poor taste and we’ve seen a lot of people getting canceled of late with the loss of their livelihoods. Kimmel, in his derisive apologies, has missed the opportunity to get ahead of this. Instead, he has languished this out even longer because he sees himself as some social justice advocate and he should get a pass on this because he’s Jimmy Kimmel? I don’t think so.

The Woke Cancel Culture is McCarthyism 2.0

Only Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais Refused To Bend the Knee

For a brief moment, I will be giving you a quick history lesson that is very significant going forward. There was this man named George Santayana. Do you know who he is? Well, congratulation if the name is familiar to you and for those who don’t know who he was, he was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. He is best known for this line that has been bastardized over the years. The line is, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I’m sure you’ve heard of it in some varying degree of iteration. This saying will be important as we continue with the history lesson.

Now, do you know who Joe McCarthy is? Joe McCarthy was a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin who served for ten years from 1947 till his death in 1957. He is best known for giving the U.S. of something known as ‘The Red Scare’, the widespread fear of the promotion of communism and for also giving the American populous McCarthyism, rightfully named after him for making false allegations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence during the late 1940s and the early 1950s. These accusations caused people to lose their jobs and be put on a blacklist as being un-American. Did you know that Lucille Ball, Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Danny Kaye, and Orson Welles was just a few of the most notable figures who were blacklisted at the time?

That brief history lesson was important as it shines a very bright light on to what is known as the woke cancel culture. The woke cancel culture is plain and simply McCarthyism 2.0 only it’s in warp speed. I’m not sure where cancel culture came from or how it manifested itself into what I refer to as a cancerous lesion to the social media platforms. If you participate in any social media platform, you must be perfect, saintly, virginal, free of controversy, you must tow the perfect line of inclusion, diversity, provide all the boxes to check and most importantly, your past should be free of blemishes and if it is not, you’re doomed, cursed and will suffer the moral outrage from a faceless entity that now holds your life in its anonymous hands.

How did the wake cancel culture become this behemoth? I will speculate that it became prominent in 2018 when it was announced that Kevin Hart was supposed to host the upcoming Academy Awards in 2019. It was one of those plumb position any comedian would give their right eye to have, to host a show that reached a global audience in one day and to increase your brand personally. But for Kevin Hart, that wasn’t the case. Some people went back to Mr. Hart’s history and found ten-year-old jokes that he did that, in today’s climate, was deemed socially problematic. These were ten-year-old jokes told by a comedian who is known for ribald humor. That didn’t matter. He said the jokes and for the woke cancel culture community, he must be fired from the Academy Awards. He would have to apologize, he would have to lay prostrate to the woke cancel culture and beg for forgiveness, he would have to humble himself to the queen of the homosexual party, Ellen DeGeneres and Kevin Hart reluctantly bent the knee. It was a knee that wasn’t bent too long as Kevin stood back up and held his ground for his past comments and stopped making apologies for something that wasn’t a mistake.

But the knee he bent was already established. The woke cancel culture had its first victim and it tasted fine. They were hungry for more and the hunt was on. In the past few months, we’ve seen a variety of woke-cancel-culture claim victim after victim for past Twitter posting, for current Twitter postings, for taking an opposing side on an issue, for speaking off the cuff with a general phraseology that was claimed as misgendering. The 1959 song, Baby It’s Cold Outside, was canceled as it was deemed to be a song about date rape or non-consensual sex. Gone With The Wind, a film that came out in 1940 depicting the South during the Civil War era, was canceled by HBO for being offensive. I’ve never seen the film because I chose not to see it because of the depiction and because of the Hollywood segregation with the awards ceremony where Hattie McDaniel received her Oscar while being seated near a back wall out of sight at a segregated table because of the Jim Crow laws at the time. However, the film was made and it won Oscars so regardless of your feelings, you are the one who decides to view it or not. I chose to look at its depiction of American blacks and I have consistently chosen to not view it. That doesn’t mean that it should be canceled. It’s still a history lesson.

And there have been numerous firings in recent weeks surrounding past statements and current statements associated with the organization Black Lives Matter. You can’t give your opposing opinion regarding this group without receiving the wrath of cancellation from the woke community. It is forbidden to have an opposing opinion, your free thought has been criminalized. Hartley Sawyer, an American actor on the CW television series, The Flash, was fired after old tweets surfaced that were deemed offensive. I read them and at worse, they were really bad jokes from someone’s attempt to be crudely funny. He has made his apologies and accepted his responsibilities for his action but why was he fired for old tweets that had nothing to do with his work on the show? What makes his jokes worse than someone like Andrew Dice Clay or the late Sam Kinison? Would the late Richard Pryor be castigated for his humor by today’s standards? Some would say that all words have meaning but in the context of which they were given. Hattie McDaniel Oscar's acceptance speech cited her saying “being a credit to her race”. That’s a cringe statement but it was acceptable during her time and also appeasement to the white culture.

Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais have maintained their sanity in these volatile moments. Ricky Gervais has called out this cancel culture and still has maintained his humor and ignored the attacks against him by just switching off their rhetoric. Dave Chappelle has ignored the shouts and cries for him to be canceled by attacking them with such aplomb that it’s like watching a skilled surgeon remove a diseased liver and replacing it with a new one. If you were offended, you’d also have to say that it did feel good with the technique.

The battlefield theater of the woke cancel culture war is being littered with an ever-growing body count. There is no pleasing them in this skirmish. Filmmakers tried appeasing them but to disastrous results. The list of films trying to go woke went broke. Charlie’s Angels went broke, Terminator: Dark Fate went broke, X-Men: Dark Phoenix massively flamed out and went broke, Birds of Prey went broke, Ghostbusters 2016 flamed out. But you wouldn’t know it from the woke cancel culture who didn’t support these films when they came out. They blame the usual suspects, mainly white heterosexual men.

We are literally burning ourselves up alive. They are rioting in the streets destroying and burning properties that have nothing to do with the death of George Floyd. Social media platforms are accepting this behavior as if it is in an abusive relationship with a partner as they refuse to acknowledge the destructive nature of that misadventure. The old McCarthyism lasted nearly a decade. How long will McCarthyism 2.0 last? For me, it should have ended in 2018but because of Twitter, that unrepentant festering malignant tumor of a social media platform that turns comments into gangrenous sores has allowed the rampant spreading of sick individuals who infect the social strata to its nth degree. Why did you bend the knee, Kevin Hart?