TUESDAY: Should Jimmy Kimmel have told that joke?

TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 2026

"Jokes are jokes," Clooney says: Should Jimmy Kimmel have told that joke? We refer to the joke he told last Thursday night—the joke which went like this:

On Thursday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host did a mock roast of President Donald Trump and officials in the administration. At one point, Kimmel got around to cracking about the first lady.

“Our First Lady Melania is here,” he said at the time. “Look at her, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” 

So joked Jimmy Kimmel, whose judgment was notably imperfect back in the Man Show days. Whose judgment is sometimes less than perfect now.

In fairness, it wasn't exactly a joke! It was a presentation performed as part of a "mock roast"—one possible problem being that, as part of an actual roast, the person being roasted has agreed to be cast in that role.  

That's one possible part of the problem. The most obvious part of the problem is this:  

As a general matter, it's a bad idea to tell a joke in which you're asking people to laugh and applaud at the thought of some public figure's death. As a general matter, entangling the target's wife in the "some day soon he'll surely be dead" almost surely adds to the shakiness of the whole idea.  

So you'll know:  

Tasteless jokes envisioning Joe Biden's death have been an ugly, demonically stupid part of the Fox News Channel's nightly menu for several years at this point. The public nutcase known as Greg Gutfeld persistently offers jokes which place the former president inside hearses or deep down in the ground. 

His disordered mind can't quit this fun; disordered creeps sit around him on his show pretending it makes perfect sense. In total fairness, let us say this:

Some of these lackeys may be so dumb that they don't see that there's a type of ugliness connected with this manifest nut-ball's behavior.  

(Also in fairness, the cable star in question needs help, or so it seems to us.) 

Given the garbage this "cable news" channel spews—let's not forget the multiple "jokes" about whether Hunter Biden had started "banging" or [BLEEP]ing first lady Jill Biden yet—it's especially pathetic to see Fox News Channel types reciting the channel's manufactured agitprop about Kimmel's joke, in which the current first lady was pictured dreaming of her husband's death. 

Sad! Under current arrangements, there's nothing those Fox News types won't do in service to corporate agitprop. There's nothing they won't do to advance the messaging of the tribe. 

But that doesn't mean that our own Man Show grad was employing good taste, or was showing good political sense, when he went with his "mock roast" joke.

No one has perfect judgment; everyone makes mistakes. It might be better, on occasion, to simply say that a certain joke should perhaps have been left unsaid.

Sadly, though—disappointingly—George Clooney didn't do that:

‘Jokes Are Jokes’: George Clooney Defends Jimmy Kimmel After Trumps Demand He Be Fired

Hollywood star and Democratic activist George Clooney stepped up to defend late-night host Jimmy Kimmel after President Donald Trump called for the comedian to be fired by ABC over a White House Correspondents’ Dinner joke mocking First Lady Melania Trump.

[...]

Speaking to Variety at the Chaplin Award Gala in New York on Monday, Clooney dismissed the backlash and drew a direct comparison to remarks by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who told Fox News ahead of the Correspondents’ Dinner that “there will be some shots fired tonight in the room,” a line widely understood as a reference to the traditional roasting at the event.

“Jimmy’s a comedian, and I would argue that Karoline Leavitt didn’t mean shots should be fired, right?” Clooney said. “She was making a joke. Fair enough. You look at that side and go, ‘Well, jokes are jokes.’ But the rhetoric is a little dangerous. And we’ve seen it a lot lately."   

The comparison to what Leavitt said (on that occasion) is very. very dumb. We find it very hard to believe that Clooney isn't much smarter than that.  

At any rate:

"Jokes are jokes," the gentleman said. In a very basic way, it's hard to argue with that.

That said, jokes are also insinuations and suggestions. They put ideas in the air.

Jokes can frequently cover for insults. And unless you think there's no such thing, a joke can be in bad taste—or, at the very least, it may strike voters that way.   

The garbage can overflows on the Fox News Channel each night. Increasingly, the sewage from the noxious 10 p.m. show has been seeping down to The Five. 

The nightly toxic waste on Fox dwarfs what Kimmel said. That said, Kimmel has often had imperfect judgment—and bad judgment by Hollywood types has been hurting liberal and Democratic Party interests for at least three decades now.   

As a general matter, it might not be the greatest idea to invite people to laugh as the picture of a public figure's death. Inserting the public figure's wife won't likely improve the mix.

Dreams of Joe Biden's death are spewed by Gutfeld night after night. He runs a corporate sewage dump. It's best left over there.