Critic’s Notebook: Jimmy Kimmel Met the Moment With His Powerful, Tightrope-Walking Monologue

At some point in the past few days, Jimmy Kimmel ceased to (just) be Jimmy Kimmel.

That is to say: After ABC suspended his series last Wednesday, he transformed in the public imagination from Jimmy Kimmel the genial talk-show host, a comedian so broadly unobjectionable that he’s hosted the Oscars four times, to Jimmy Kimmel the symbol, a high-profile victim of creeping American authoritarianism and therefore a hero of free speech to rally behind.

Upon his return Tuesday night, then, he had a tough line to walk, as Jimmy Kimmel Live! itself acknowledged in an opening montage of newscasters talking about what a “huge moment in American history” his monologue would be. Still, even with all that heated anticipation, it’s hard to imagine anyone would have blamed him if he’d tried to simply return to business as usual — to crack a couple of wry jokes before moving on as quickly as possible.

Instead, he rose to the occasion with an arresting 18-minute monologue that struck a high-difficulty balance between showing us a Kimmel worthy of all the outcry raised on his behalf without over-inflating his own importance, of keeping up the heat as needed without letting it boil over — and then, finally, of letting Jimmy Kimmel Live! get back to the show it’s always been.

Sincerity has long been Kimmel’s not-so-secret weapon when talking about issues near to his heart, and he deployed it expertly this evening. He profusely thanked all his supporters, all the family and friends, all the colleagues who’d expressed their solidarity with him. (One German talk show, he said, even offered him a job: “Can you imagine? This country has become so authoritarian that the Germans are like, ‘Come over here.’”)

He became visibly emotional as the crowd showered him with cheers and standing ovations, and choked up as he spoke about Kirk’s killing. Not for nothing, he managed to reiterate his sympathies for Kirk’s family and his condemnation of political violence without posthumously lionizing Kirk as something he wasn’t — something that some actual journalists have failed to do.

Anticipating questions about whether he’d be forced to apologize, Kimmel whipped out a statement to read on behalf of his parent company: instructions on how to reactivate all those Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions canceled in protest. Though the immediate pivot to thanking Disney for letting him back on air after pulling him off it in the first place might have made you wonder if the real unspoken condition for his reinstatement was a show of contrition toward his corporate bosses.

He embraced his unasked-for role as a First Amendment warrior, referencing Stephen Colbert’s cancelation and calling for his viewers to get “ten times as loud” should Trump come after NBC’s Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon, as threatened. While Jimmy Kimmel Live! is back on air, it still won’t be shown by affiliates owned by Nexstar and Sinclair — so the show put the monologue up on YouTube instead, where neither company can stop people from watching it.

Kimmel’s support was not limited to other talk show hosts or comedians, but extended to other members of the media. He directed attention to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recent demand that journalists pledge not to release any unauthorized information. “They want to pick and choose what the news is,” said Kimmel. “I know that’s not as interesting as muzzling a comedian but it’s so important to have a free press, and it’s nuts we’re not paying more attention to it.”

If Kimmel had jabs to offer, he also had olive branches. Sort of. He thanked the likes of Ben Shapiro and Mitch McConnell and Joe Rogan for coming to his defense — but he did so while acknowledging that “some of the [other] things that they say make me want to throw up.” He shared his hope that the shakily bipartisan solidarity formed around him might extend to other issues, like “keeping children safe from guns, reproductive rights for women, social security, affordable health care, pediatric cancer research,” emphasizing that “these are all things most Americans support.”

And, of course, he had jokes. Lest anyone fear Trump had cowed him into silence, Kimmel snarked that the move had “backfired bigly” by drawing even more eyeballs to his show, cracking, “He might have to release the Epstein files to distract us from this now.” He showed clips of Trump’s rambling speeches against Tylenol (“Brought to you by Motrin,” Kimmel quipped) and at the UN, and generally made no secret of his ongoing distaste for the man.

But he saved the lion’s share of his mockery for FCC chairman Brendan Carr, comparing him to a mafioso — though “If you want to hear a mob boss make a threat like that, you have to hide a microphone in a deli and park outside in a van with a tape recorder all night long,” whereas “this genius said it on a podcast.” After the first commercial break, he doubled down on the comparison with a special appearance by Robert De Niro as the new head of the agency, making stereotypically mob-like threats.

That segment, no less pointed than the monologue but pitched in a much sillier tone, proved an ideal bridge between Kimmel’s galvanizing monologue and the rest of his show, which receded back into a comfortable normal.

His only guest was Glen Powell, a rising movie star so noncontroversial that even his weird promotional non-fling with Sydney Sweeney couldn’t generate much in the way of controversy, shilling for a series about that most American of passions, college football. A musical performance by Sarah McLachlan finished off the night. Though she’d canceled her own performance at Hulu’s Lilith Fair documentary premiere Sunday in objection to Kimmel’s suspension, Kimmel made no mention of it; the act of having her on served as his silent gesture of gratitude.

After the performance, he ended his show, as usual, by thanking his guests and apologizing to Matt Damon. By that point, you could almost be lulled into thinking you were watching just another episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, same as the thousands and thousands that have aired before over the past two decades.

Except, of course, Jimmy Kimmel Live! isn’t just Jimmy Kimmel Live! anymore, either. Even as Kimmel returns to his regular job of interviewing celebrities about their upcoming projects while joking about current events and lightly roasting public figures, this moment is always going to be remembered in the history of either America’s tragic slide into authoritarianism or its triumphant rise out of it.

“I’ve been hearing a lot about what I need to say and do tonight. The truth is, I don’t think it’ll make much of a difference,” Kimmel said at one point. “I have no illusions about changing anyone’s mind.” He’s probably right, in the sense that those who hated him are unlikely to come away from the hour loving him, those who loved him are unlikely to come away hating him, and those who never felt strongly about him will surely go back to mostly ignoring his show when it’s not being fed to them piecemeal as viral clips on TikTok.

But tonight, Kimmel did everything he needed to do. He became the Jimmy Kimmel the past week had turned him into, without losing sight of the Jimmy Kimmel he’d always been.