Jimmy Kimmel’s demise exposes how power fears ridicule
Comedy is not a sideshow. It is part of the main act. When comedy vanishes, rulers mistake themselves for the nation.
Steve Vizard
Sep 19, 2025
The lights dim, the cue cards drop, and another American late-night live stage goes dark. ABC has suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! – a fixture since 2003 – after its host’s riff on the assassination of right-wing MAGA activist Charlie Kirk earned a fusillade of outrage and, more dangerously, a not-so-veiled threat from the chair of the Federal Communications Commission. Within hours, Nexstar affiliates dumped the show.
This was never about taste. It was about power. When Donald Trump, from somewhere near Windsor Castle, heard of Kimmel’s demise and declared it “Great news for America”, you could almost hear Juvenal muttering from antiquity: satire had struck home. Two things were revealed at once. First, the comedy was doing its job. Second, the president was now freer to do his. Power has always understood this tension. Hatred can be endured. Ridicule cannot.
Kimmel is the latest in a string of comedic disappearances. Stephen Colbert’s Late Show was cancelled in July. CBS blamed “finances.” Colbert’s nightly vivisections of Trumpism suggested another culprit.
Jon Stewart’s The Problem vanished in 2023 after Apple decided that free speech was all very well until it touched China or artificial intelligence. “They didn’t want me saying things that might get me in trouble,” Stewart conceded. Samantha Bee was axed in a corporate “restructuring”. Each removal arriving precisely when US politics needed them most.
Seth Meyers survives, Fallon too. John Oliver continues to hurl grenades on HBO, still winning Emmys. Bill Maher endures. Saturday Night Live staggers on, more tourist attraction than insurgency. Fox’s Gutfeld! – a MAGA rally with better lighting – thrives. One suspects that in the present climate, comedy survives best where it flatters power.
But the fragility is palpable. One regulator’s threat – “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr warned – was enough to make ABC fold faster than a Mar-a-Lago deckchair.
Kimmel is no Aristophanes. He is not Stewart, nor even Colbert. What matters is the idea of Kimmel – of a culture that can laugh at power, of the nightly national ritual of puncturing pomposity. Democracies are not upheld by marble facades or parchment texts alone; they endure by the constant grassroots cutting-down-to-size of overstepping entitlement. Every sketch that exposes a lie, every monologue that renders the mighty ridiculous, every audience that guffaws in recognition – these are how we help keep power in its proper place.
Comedy patrols the boundaries of what is acceptable. It shines a light where power prefers shadow. It draws us together not merely in an act of laughter but in a moment of collective attention – of seeing, with sudden clarity, what is hiding in plain sight. The comedian’s trick is to point out the bleeding obvious and give it a twist, reminding us that power, for all its uniforms, is mere flesh. Power hates this - not only being laughed at, but being seen. As Orwell observed, “Every joke is a tiny revolution.”
Australia has always laughed itself into shape. From The Bulletin in the 1880s, where Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson sharpened verse into satire, to Roy Rene’s bawdy vaudeville, to Barry Humphries’ Dame Edna and Sir Les, our humour has been less garnish than glue.
“Censorship rarely arrives as censorship. It masquerades as ‘standards’, ‘civility’, ‘responsibility’, ‘safety’.”
Rubbery Figures reduced politicians to latex grotesques, Clarke and Dawe skewered Olympic fiascos and asylum policy with unerring monotonal precision, Shaun Micallef turned Mad as Hell into a parade of absurdity. Norman Gunston, standing bewildered on the steps of parliament in 1975, embodied the Dismissal as well as any historian. Gerry Connolly transformed Joh Bjelke-Petersen into a vaudeville act of cheerful incompetence. Denton could talk a prime minister into confessing the limits of power; Magda Szubanski helped make marriage equality common sense; Tim Minchin rattled the Catholic Church with a song.
From Graham Kennedy’s In Melbourne Tonight to Utopia, and a hundred shows between, these weren’t just programs; they were pressure valves. When Australian free-to-air decided it could survive only on sport and news, abandoning the third pillar – live entertainment – we didn’t just lose laughs. We lost one of democracy’s ways of keeping itself limber.
Never has the need for national laughter been greater. Nor the freedom to express ourselves more problematic. Look around: the space is narrowing. Marches every weekend – Palestine, climate, immigration – yet increasingly corralled by permits and police tape. Universities, once rehearsal rooms for democracy, now choreograph dissent with bureaucratic clumsiness.
Censorship rarely arrives as censorship. It masquerades as “standards”, “civility”, “responsibility”, “safety.”
Today, the White House calls it “consequence culture”. Such is the language by which power normalises censorship. Consequence is what happens when you drop a glass; culture is what happens when you drop a truth. To confuse them is more than a category error. Voltaire’s line remains illuminating: to discover who rules you, ask who you may not criticise.
Yes, television is shrinking. More Americans now mainline TikTok than tune in at 11.35pm. But half the country still gets its news from the box in the corner, and a Kimmel riff that reached 2 million at midnight can ricochet to 20 million by breakfast. The medium may change – fibre-optic cables replacing rabbit ears – but the instinct of power does not. Whether the joke lands on broadcast towers or broadband feeds, power will always try to muzzle it. Laughter is scrutiny, and scrutiny is democracy.
This is not about Jimmy Kimmel, nor about one joke. Laughter has always been the first audit, the oldest check and balance. Aristophanes ridiculed Athens’ war-makers, Roman satirists turned emperors into grotesques, and medieval courts kept fools because somebody had to tell the truth. Comedy is not a sideshow. It is part of the main act. It says the unsayable. It risks overstatement so that the rest of us can find the middle ground. When comedy vanishes, rulers mistake themselves for the nation.
For Australians, the irony is palpable. On the very day Trump celebrates silencing Kimmel, his team somehow bars Australia’s ABC from a press conference at Chequers. The unstated reason: our national broadcaster has been too “critical”. Thus, Australia is excluded not only from a close hearing about the largest defence pact in its history, AUKUS, but from hearing about its own head of state. Comedy could make quick work of it, but only if comedy is still allowed on stage.
On Air Force One, flushed with triumph over Kimmel, Trump announced that television networks giving him “97 per cent negative” coverage might have their licences taken away – though the FCC, as every intern knows, doesn’t licence networks at all. The inaccuracy is beside the point. What matters is the escalation. No longer content with gloating at a comedian’s suspension, or leaning on corporations through merger politics and affiliate pressure, Trump is now toying with the idea of the state deciding which channels live and which die. Obama calls it a “dangerous escalation”, an FCC commissioner says it “put the foundation of the First Amendment in danger”. What began as innuendo has become proclamation. From the indirect to the overt, from the wink to the hammer.
Another American president, a great one, Franklin D. Roosevelt, sounded clear warnings about such matters – “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism.”
Democracies can survive bad taste, and even bad presidents. What they cannot survive is the silence that falls when the laughter stops – such silence is not tranquillity but the sound of cold power expanding unchallenged.
Steve Vizard created satirical comedy shows Fast Forward, Full Frontal and his own Tonight Show. He is a chief investigator on the Australian Research Council project Comedy Country: Australian Performance Comedy as an Agent of Change.