Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) broke with President Donald Trump and his MAGA faction as he defended late night host Jimmy Kimmel amid right-wing pressure for him to be fired over a joke calling first lady Melania Trump an “expectant widow.”
“I don’t want to cancel comedy. I believe in freedom of speech,” he told NewsNation on Wednesday. “I think that was, you know, a lot of Kimmel’s jokes are tasteless and probably borderline inappropriate. But the end of the day, he has a right to do that. And the viewers, if they don’t like it, they can turn the channel.”
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Comer then urged the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider its demand for Disney to file broadcasting license renewals for eight of its local ABC stations years before they were initially set to expire.
“I would hope that if my friend [FCC chair] Brendan Carr is looking at something on ABC, it has more to do than with a tasteless joke, so hopefully we can move on,” the Kentucky lawmaker said.
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Calling himself “a big fan of comedy,” Comer added, “All the comedians, and I know a lot of them, feel like many people, usually from the left, have kind of canceled comedy, and I think that’s unfortunate.”
The congressman, who is chair of the House Oversight Committee, did say he hoped Kimmel would pull back on the dark humor, however, telling NewsNation, “I think that gets a lot of people jacked up, and I think that contributes to the rise in political violence that we’re seeing.”
Kimmel is being accused of stoking violence by quipping that the first lady had the glow of an “expectant widow” in a sketch that aired days before a shooter attempted to ambush a Washington, D.C., dinner that Trump and several key Cabinet members were attending.
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Defending himself from backlash from the president, his wife and other right-wing figures during his Monday show, Kimmel called the comment a “very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am.
“It was not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination,” he said. “And they know that. I’ve been very vocal for many years, speaking out against gun violence in particular.”