Hey, Jimmy Kimmel, one of your fellow talk show hosts can now feel your pain. And anger. And annoyance.
To some extent, at least.
Earlier this week, days after the federal government pressured ABC to pull Kimmel off the air due to comments he made in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Joy Behar commented on the controversy.
Behar defended Kimmel by criticizing the world’s “very weak men” who “can’t take a joke,” prompting the White House to respond to the comedian’s remarks in a statement to Entertainment Weekly.
“Per usual, Joyless Behar is wrong about many things,” reads the message from White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson.
Jackson claimed that the recent ordeal involving Kimmel’s temporary suspension from his talk show over had “nothing to do with free speech.”
She then referred to Kimmel as a “low-ratings loser” whom she feels “has always been free to make whatever bad jokes he wants.”
One, of course, can naturally wonder why the administration is speaking to Entertainment Weekly. But we don’t have an answer to that.
Jackson, meanwhile, went on to say that a “private company — who is the one that decided to take his show off and put it back on — is under no obligation to lose money producing an unpopular show.”
This is irrelevant to the issue at hand, but true.
Also true: Kimmel returned on Tuesday night to a whopping 6.3 million viewers. So much for having an unpopular show, huh?
And yet… Jackson added that “Jimmy Kimmel’s terrible product isn’t a free speech problem; it’s a talent problem” and that “Joyless is probably worried about her own garbage ratings — we can’t blame her!”
Shockingly, however, the White House may have some bad information here.
A show press release from July indicated that season 28 of The View was “its most-watched in four years” in key demographics, and was, at the time, ranking first in terms of number of households and total viewers (2.55 million) “among all network daytime talk shows and news programs for the 5th straight season.”
That, and Kimmel continues to trash Donald Trump.