Channeling the fox in Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Grapes,” late-night TV show host Jimmy Kimmel made the above observation yesterday during a profile of him on CBS’s “Sunday Morning.”
The comment came in reaction to questions about his recent emotionally charged live-air forays into political topics such as health care and gun control, which prompted interviewer Tracy Smith to ask, “It’s a bit of a risk that you’re taking, talking about that stuff? You might lose the audience.”
Here is Kimmel’s reply:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Yeah, I mean, I saw, I don’t know if it was a study or a poll, some combination of those two things, that, like, three years ago I was equally liked by Republicans and Democrats. And then Republican numbers went way down, like 30% or whatever. And, you know, as a talk show host, that’s not ideal. But I would do it again in a heartbeat.
When Smith asked, “So you don’t mind if Republicans turn off your show, they’re not watching anymore?” Kimmel was equally ambivalent:
I don’t say, ‘I don’t mind.’ I’d love for everyone — I want everyone with a television to watch the show. But if they’re so turned off by my opinion on healthcare and gun violence, then I don’t know. I probably won’t wanna have a conversation with them anyway.
Despite claiming that he’s “nobody’s moral arbiter,” Kimmel recently said that he’d love to have Donald Trump on his show, explaining, “Maybe this is crazy, but I feel like I could turn him around on a couple of things.”
https://youtu.be/1KMkxOBVp18
The more Kimmel speaks out on political issues, which lately have included a soft stance on sex offender Harvey Weinstein, the more confused he sounds. Consider this comment that he made the night after the Las Vegas shootings:
Maybe I’m nuts, but I would like to think we could put politics aside and agree that no American citizen needs an M-16, or 10 of them. And maybe that way, we don’t do this again.
Agreeing with him is putting aside politics? Convenient.
