Where would we be without Jimmy Kimmel?

We’d never know when the walls are closing in, our democracy was hanging by a thread or an East Wing renovation threatened world peace.

Thankfully, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” is there when we need it most. Or, so Kimmel thinks.

Jimmy Kimmel tells his critics to shove it and to stop telling him his job is to be funny.

Clearly, he’s doing a good job at that. pic.twitter.com/UkqbMOA4uc

— MRC NewsBusters (@newsbusters) April 17, 2026

The far-Left comic defended his comedy-free shtick during an appearance on “IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson” podcast. His explanation? These are challenging times, and President Donald Trump’s second term is no laughing matter.

Thus, the show’s dramatic transition from laughter to “clapter.”

It would be “embarrassing” not to discuss such threats to the American experiment, in his estimation. Anyone who suggests he simply tell jokes has it all wrong.

“These are things that I take very seriously,” he said. “And, of course, I like to, I love telling jokes, I love being funny, I love when the audience laughs. There’s nothing that’s more exciting to me than that. But well-rounded human beings don’t behave that way.”

In fact, it’s exactly how late-night legend Johnny Carson would handle current events, in Kimmel’s estimation.

Except the “Tonight Show” legend would do no such thing. How do we know? He said it himself.

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Denver’s “Ryan Schuiling Live,” heard on 630 KHOW weekdays from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., played a critical clip from Carson’s past today. The snippet finds “60 Minutes” star Mike Wallace quizzing Carson about the political gags heard on his legendary “Tonight Show.”

Audiences never knew whether Carson was on the Left, Right or Middle. He hit both sides, and he did so with equal glee. No malice, just smiles.

That approach made him an icon.

Editor’s Note: It’s a brutal time to be an independent journalist, but it’s never been more necessary given the sorry state of the corporate press. If you’re enjoying Hollywood in Toto, I hope you’ll consider leaving a coin (or two) in our Tip Jar.

Carson’s successor, Jay Leno, kept that bipartisan, upbeat spirit alive. Now, it’s a relic of the past trashed by the likes of Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Kimmel and the soon-to-be-unemployed Stephen Colbert.

Wallace pressed Carson on that decision, and the talker had a ready, emphatic answer.

It’s not my job, he insisted.

“Tell me the last time a Jack Benny, a Red Skelton or any comedian used his show to do serious issues. That’s not what I’m there for. Can’t they see that?” Carson asked at the time. “Just because you have a ‘Tonight Show’ you must deal in serious issues. That’s a danger. It’s a real danger. Once you start that, you start to get that self-important feeling that what you say has great import, and you know, strangely enough, you can use that show as a forum. You could sway people, and I don’t think you should as an entertainer.”

Why, you might repeatedly cry on the air and treat your showcase like a one-sided political screed.

Jimmy Failla on “FOX Across America” has played that clip before. He’s no fan of the Kimmel brand of late-night TV.

He should know. Failla hosts “Fox News Saturday Night,” which recently enjoyed its highest ratings to date.

Failla noted earlier this week that Carson was at his late-night desk for decades. And, during that time, he watched as America splintered over the Vietnam War, suffered a presidential scandal that chased a world leader out of the Oval Office and other consequential events.

Carson never went near the current Kimmel model.

Kimmel will drop the laughs to push his propaganda content. Not Carson. That’s a key reason why one is a TV legend, and the other had to be suspended for a week after lying about a major U.S. assassination.

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… is from Thomas Jefferson’s argument in the 1770 case Howell v. Netherland:

Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance.

DBx: Born on this date – April 13th – in 1743 in Shadwell, Virginia, Jefferson 33 years later wrote one of humankind’s most stirring, and justly most famous, defenses of individual liberty. The fact that Jefferson often failed personally to live up to his ideals is undeniable, well-known, and regrettable. Yet it’s also true that Jefferson’s quill is one of history’s most effective forces for true liberalism.

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… is from page 175 of the 1990 second edition of David Friedman’s excellent book, Price Theory: An Intermediate Text:

More generally, it will pay the landlord to include in the lease contract any terms that are worth more to the tenant than they cost him – and adjust the rent accordingly. Given that he has done so, any requirement that he provide additional security (or other terms in the contract) forces the landlord to add terms to the lease that cost him more than they are worth to the tenant. The ultimate result is a rent increase that leaves both landlord and tenant worse off than before.

DBx: Price theory is beautiful. Among it’s many splendid features is that it warns that government efforts to change one or more terms of an exchange (for example, the level of physical security landlords provide to tenants) will result in changes in other terms of the exchange that make the intended beneficiaries of the first change worse off.

One of many terms in landlord-tenant exchanges (or contracts) is the amount of money that tenants pay monthly to landlords. Proponents of rent-control naively believe that forcing down this term of exchange – that is, forbidding tenants from paying more than some government-allowed monthly rent – is the end of the story. Rent-control proponents stubbornly refuse to see that rental contracts contain countless other terms – some explicit, most implicit – that will, when rent-control is imposed, be adjusted in ways that leave tenants worse off even though tenants are paying a smaller amount of money each month to landlords.

Most proponents of rent controls (and of price controls generally) call themselves “progressive” – a term that in practice seems to be a label for people who proudly look only at the most obvious, intended consequences of economic and policy actions, while ignoring less obvious and unintended consequences.

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… is from page 16 of H.L. Mencken’s, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy (1995); specifically, it’s from Mencken’s Preface to his and George Jean Nathan’s 1920 book, The American Credo:

The whole thinking of the country thus runs down the channel of mob emotion; there is no actual conflict of ideas, but only a succession of crazes.

DBx: Strictly speaking, Mencken here exaggerates, but only just a bit. His larger point about crazes stands.

Underlying each successive craze is an idea, or set of ideas, usually either half-baked or completely bonkers. “America’s middle-class has been impoverished by Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and other billionaires!” “Our greater access to goods and services from abroad results in us having less access to goods and services in total!” “The U.S. trade deficit with China proves that China is mistreating Americans! And ditto the U.S. trade deficit with Canada!” “Immigrants come to America to aggressively steal our jobs and to lazily live off of the U.S. welfare state!” “Government-run grocery stores will bring an abundance of groceries to inner cities!” “As long as creditors are willing to lend to the U.S. government, the accumulation of U.S. government debt isn’t a problem!” “Rising prices in the aftermath of natural disasters are caused by greed!”

Fortunately, there are some sound and serious ideas, mostly those called “classical liberal,” always in competition with such nutty ones. Liberal idea are (as the late Bob Tollison never tired of saying) “part of the equilibrium” – meaning, the development, refinement, and promulgation of liberal ideas reduce the negative consequences of the far-more-numerous whackadoodle ideas that are the standard fare served up by politicians, professors, and pundits.

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… is from page 66 of the late Brian Doherty’s marvelous 2007 book, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement:

Modern libertarianism is a vision of a radical and just future – but one whose contours are inherent in the meaning of the American Revolution, arising from European traditions of natural law, natural rights, a relationship between man and the state that ought to be contractual and reciprocal; and a vision of man that is rooted in the best of the Western Christian tradition. That vision sees the individual soul as so worth saving that God-made-man would sacrifice himself to do so. And that individual soul is responsible for the choices that can guarantee its own salvation.

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