Jimmy Kimmel Stands Strong Amidst Renewed Calls for His Job

I’m always worried that I’m going to get fired from one of my jobs, including this one! I’ve spent weekends thinking, “Dustin won’t like that I did XYZ, and that’ll be it.” Now, most of that is (I think) in my head. I’ve had some bad experiences with other jobs before, especially when working directly for the owner, and it can be hard to shake certain feelings of inadequacy. So, I just have to take a deep breath and relax sometimes, and at least be grateful that, while he may be planning to remove me at any minute, Dustin and his wife aren’t publicly calling for my job.

That is what’s happening to good ole Jimmy Kimmel. The President of the United States and his wife have (once again) been calling for Kimmel to be fired, after a joke he made last week gained new attention after a shooter attempted to harm members of the current administration at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The joke in question? Kimmel was holding a mock roast on his show and remarked that the President’s wife had the glow of an “expectant widow.” Pretty funny, and accurate in a host of ways.

But, given that there has never been a more thin-skinned Presidential administration, the crybabies are crybabying. They are calling for Kimmel to be fired, and this comes months after they had successfully removed him from the airwaves. The question now is whether or not Disney, with a new CEO at the helm, caves to this crazy administration’s demands. There is no upside to doing so, as the President’s approval ratings crumble, but that hasn’t stopped people before.

Kimmel certainly isn’t taking any of it lying down, kicking off his show by saying, “Sometimes you wake up in the morning, and the First Lady puts out a statement demanding you be fired from your job. We’ve all been there, right?” But then, Kimmel dug in a little deeper:

“This was Thursday. There was no big reaction to it, until this morning, when I greeted the day facing yet another Twitter vomit storm and a call to fire me from our First Lady, Melania Trump, saying I should be fired because of a joke I made again five nights ago. It was a pretend roast,” he explained. “It obviously was a joke about their age difference and the look of joy we see on her face every time they’re together. It was 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, and they know that. I’ve been very vocal for many years, speaking out against gun violence, but I understand that the First Lady had a stressful experience over the weekend, and probably every weekend is pretty stressful in that house.”

The host then explained that if the First Lady really wanted the rhetoric toned down, then she should start with her husband. He is, after all, the one who fires off at the mouth constantly, but it’s only a “problem” when the people he doesn’t like talk back. I’m not saying anything new here, but it sure is pretty damn exhausting. I don’t know how Kimmel deals with it.