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The Hard Pivot Kimmel Makes When Bill Burr Starts To Go on a 'Free Luigi' Rant

By Dustin Rowles | News | January 15, 2025 |

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Header Image Source: ABC

Like many people, I’m in a strange place with political news right now. It’s not that I don’t want to stay informed; I just don’t need a half-hour of The Daily dissecting Pete Hegseth’s confirmation, another hour of Ezra Klein revisiting the mistakes of the 2024 election, or endless drama loops on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. Even Aaron Rupar clips of those same networks playing up the drama feel like too much. Yesterday’s confirmation hearings could easily be summed up in one headline: “Pete Hegseth is dangerously unfit to run the military, but he will be confirmed anyway.”

I also don’t need cable news coverage of the wildfires filtered through the lens of political division. Thousands of people are losing their homes — do we really need to hear about politicians in Texas and Louisiana second-guessing California officials? The election was two months ago, and the next one is 22 months away. Does every politician need to immediately jump back into campaign mode? Can’t they just, you know, govern, be civil, and focus on improving their constituents’ lives? We keep lamenting the death of legacy media, but it still manages to churn out endless fodder for everyone else to comment on.

Bill Burr was on Jimmy Kimmel Live last night. His family recently evacuated their home because of the Los Angeles fires, and he’s understandably annoyed. As he told Variety, politicians weaponizing the fires is infuriating: “I think it’s treasonous behavior to politicize everything, keeping regular working people at each other’s throats. That is only good for one group of people, and it’s not working people.”

On Kimmel, he spent the first few minutes complaining about the Internet’s armchair fire experts, sitting in their underwear in Nebraska, claiming they know better. Then he moved on to railing against insurance executives. Around the 2:30 mark, he dropped a “Free Luigi” reference, joked about people asking, “Why did that happen?” and quipped, “He wrote on the bullets why it happened.” Kimmel laughed, responded with, “Oh, we’re back to Luigi,” and Burr replied, “I never left Luigi.” Suddenly, there was an obvious edit, and Kimmel had moved on.

Maybe the edit was just laughter or dead air, or maybe Burr kept ranting about insurance executives and Luigi, and ABC decided to cut it. Either way, Burr brought up what really matters: the people suffering, who now have to depend on the frustrating insurance industry to rebuild their lives. Meanwhile, everyone else seems focused on meaningless Twitter commentary or scoring points about “owning the libs,” ignoring the reality of those who just lost everything.