Late Night Last Week: Jimmy Kimmel Faces History

Each week, Late Night Last Week highlights some of the best late night TV from the previous week. This week, we cover how late night hosts responded to the killing of Charlie Kirk and political violence in America. We also recap how each show did at the 2025 Emmy Awards.

Jimmy Kimmel is an unconventional comedian. Unlike his peers, he did not break into late night television via the clubs or sketch comedy. Nor is he some great wit in the tradition of Jack Paar and Dick Cavett. But he possesses, perhaps more so than any broadcaster in the late night world today, a sense of comedy history.

For those who kneel before the icons of 20th-century comedy, Kimmel’s show has been essential viewing. Heroes like Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett, and Mel Brooks have all found a home on Kimmel’s couch. When his friend Don Rickles died at the age of 90 in 2017, Kimmel cried through a moving tribute to the great man. He never misses a chance to describe himself as a student of David Letterman’s, citing with reverence each bit and beat of his broadcasts.

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Were it not for the saga of the last few weeks, Kimmel’s place in the history of late-night television would have been an altogether unremarkable one. In recent years, his show has mostly become a friendly landing spot for celebrities, many of whom are there to plug their respective Disney-owned properties. His best moments have been when he gets personal, whether it be playing family pranks or discussing his own children. There’s also the whole Matt Damon thing.

His great success has been in becoming the affable face of the American Broadcasting Corporation. For decades, ABC failed to have a late night property of its own. The network’s most conventional success may have been the short-lived Joey Bishop Show (1967-1969), where a young showman by the name of Regis Philbin worked as the sidekick. There were long stretches of time between failed efforts to poach talent like Letterman and Leno where ABC had nothing to compete against the juggernauts of NBC and, eventually, CBS.

It seemed that the network was finally onto something in 1997, when Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher moved from Comedy Central to ABC. Four years later, the host was pulled off the air following controversial comments made in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. On HBO two weeks ago, Bill Maher himself noted the eerie similarity between himself and Kimmel, who was indefinitely suspended by ABC exactly 24 years to the day Maher himself was removed.

The story, however, ended far differently. Last Tuesday, September 23, Kimmel returned to the ABC airwaves after a brief suspension. His monologue oozed with that clear sense of history from the outset. He began by borrowing a line from Paar, the second man to steer The Tonight Show, who famously walked off the program after learning NBC had censored a joke he made about the “water closet.” Kimmel uttered the same words as Paar did when he returned to the air: “As I was saying before I was interrupted…”

The lessons of history featured heavily just two days earlier in John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight monologue on the Kimmel saga. As the program’s fate hung in the balance, Oliver made a direct plea to Disney CEO Bob Iger. “One day, the history of the time we’re living through is going to be written,” Oliver said. “When it is, I’m not sure it’s those in this administration who will come off the worst.”

“They will come off terribly,” he continued. “But history is also going to remember the cowards who definitely knew better, but still let things happen, whether for money, convenience, or comfort.”

Iger, it seems, may have weighed that very question. Time—and the histories that are sure to come—will tell just how Disney decided to play their hand in the face of apparent government pressure.

Remarkably, were it not for this saga, the history of Jimmy Kimmel’s tenure behind a late-night desk would have been vastly different and far less notable. His great strength has been one of providing stability to a network that has benefited from the exponential growth of its parent company. In the early days of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the show struggled to book guests. Now, the host finds himself co-workers with The Avengers, Luke Skywalker, and the cast of Frozen.

Yet Kimmel has grown as an entertainer, too. As a host, he has performed ably at events ranging from the Oscars and the White House Correspondents Dinner to the chair once occupied by Philbin on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Before this month, it was a long, solid, and lucrative career—and little more.

Now, Kimmel’s name will forever be associated with the comedians he himself name-checked in his return monologue. Lenny Bruce, who was arrested on obscenity charges. George Carlin, himself actually censored by the FCC for his use of “seven dirty words,” a fight he eventually lost before the Supreme Court. And Howard Stern, the shock jock who grew so fed up with the FCC that he left terrestrial radio to help launch Sirius Satellite Radio (now SiriusXM).

“Look, I never imagined I would be in a situation like this,” Kimmel said in his monologue. “I barely paid attention in school. But one thing I did learn from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Howard Stern is that a government threat to silence a comedian the president doesn’t like is anti-American. That’s anti-American.”

Before the events of the last few weeks, no one would have put Kimmel in this category. One must think even Kimmel himself would laugh at the thought of being associated with such innovative men of comedy. But now, there he is, back on the air, vaulted into a new, more significant place in comedy history. Now, with ABC at his back and affiliates announcing their return, he has the chance to make the most of it. Whether he will lean into the fray or retreat into comfort remains uncertain.

In Bruce and Carlin, one finds the case of carefully crafted lines and bits, aimed at pushing the culture forward in the face of government censorship. In Kimmel, we have a throwaway line, a sentence that may or may not have been a joke, one that no one, not even his defenders, can agree on what he meant to say. What could be more fitting for our time?

Will DiGravio is a Brooklyn-based critic, researcher, and late night comedy columnist, who first contributed to Paste in 2022. He is an assistant editor at Cineaste, a GALECA member, and since 2019 has hosted The Video Essay Podcast. You can follow and/or unfollow him on Twitter and learn more about him via his website.