Even Kimmel's Audience Turns On Him After Disgusting Sexual Joke About Ivanka
Even Jimmy Kimmel’s audience, it seems, has its limits. And those limits are disgusting jokes about the president’s daughter.
I know, I was somewhat shocked too. I was expecting the limit to be, say, actively calling for Donald Trump’s supporters to be mauled by a bear or something like that. Even that might not chart the outer limits of bad taste for certain corners of liberaldom, either.
But, no — a Thursday joke about Ivanka Trump revealed that the red line does exist for some in the audience, and that line is grotesquely bad sexual humor aimed at someone solely because they’re on a different side of the political aisle.
A clip from Thursday’s monologue reveals it was mostly standard “Jimmy Kimmel Live” fare. The titular host talked about the fact that the president had canceled a White House holiday party for the press and then quipped, “Not only did he cancel the press party, he’s also very close to canceling the Republican Party as a whole.”
Oh ho ho. Kimmel went on to compare a potential press party to something like the violent “red wedding” from “Game of Thrones” and talked about the president’s tweets about Michael Cohen in which Trump said he never directed his former attorney to break the law.
“That’s actually true,” Kimmel said. “He didn’t tell Michael Cohen to break the law. He paid him to break the law. He just winked and said, ‘I’m just going to leave $130,000 on this table, if it’s not there when I get back, I guess it blew away.'”
This elicited mostly crickets.
He went on to play a clip of Trump saying he didn’t know about the non-disclosure agreement with porn star Stormy Daniels that Cohen negotiated.
“First it was, ‘I never had sex with those women,’ then it was, ‘I never paid those women,’ now it’s, ‘I assumed it was legal to pay those women,'” Kimmel joked.
“Next week he’ll say he didn’t know they were women, that’s why he asked them to take off their clothes.”
That, at least, got a bit of applause.
The crowd turned on Kimmel, however, when he joked about reports that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was in consideration to replace John Kelly as White House chief of staff.
“I guess the thinking is, if he’s good enough to screw my daughter, he’s good enough to screw the country,” Kimmel said.
This evoked plenty of boos — although, in fairness, it also got some claps. So there isn’t that definitive red line, mind you, but it was enough for Kimmel to try to move on from the gag.
“I really hope he hires Jared and then he fires Jared so we go through the whole thing,” Kimmel said.
The whole thing as in, like, bad jokes? Because I think you can do that without Chief of Staff Kushner.
It’s difficult to figure out the genesis of this joke. It’s not funny. It evinces, yet again, a bizarre fascination among liberals regarding Ivanka Trump’s sex life (and how it’s presumably icky). I know it’s a tired gambit by now to do the whole reverse-the-roles thing, but consider if any comedian or writer took aim at a major liberal female’s sex life. The deluge of 5,000-word thinkpieces on how this was emblematic of the casual misogyny of American political life would break the internet for a few days.
All this got was some boos. And sadly, that’s a more appropriate reaction than I would have expected.
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