Adam Carolla has come to Jimmy Kimmel‘s defense amid the backlash he’s faced for his “expectant widow” joke.
The right-leaning comedian reacted to the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host’s remarks made at his faux White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which he began by noting that he was going to approach the topic “from a comedic standpoint.”
“That’s a pretty typical roast joke,” Carolla said on The Adam Carolla Show. “It is also a trope: Any younger, beautiful woman who’s married to an older guy, especially if the guy’s rumored to be sort of a douchey, you would make that joke at any roast.”
Donald and Melania Trump both called for the late night host to be fired from Jimmy Kimmel Live! for a joke he made ahead of the shooting at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
On Thursday, Kimmel poked fun at the event, sharing faux remarks for the dinner. He addressed the First Lady by noting, “Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”
“When you make a joke and then nothing happens, like there was no shooting, no one made a thing about it before the shooting. So then it’s kind of a thing where you go, like, ‘Oh, that Elisha Krauss, I hate that bitch, I hope she dies!’ And then two days later, you get in a car crash, and you die, then everyone looks at me and goes, ‘Now I’m angry at you,’” Carolla said. “But I’m like, if she never got in a car crash, you never said anything.”
Carolla continued, “Like, this thing happened, then the joke happened before. So, A) it’s unrelated. B) I mean, to be fair, now people do this one too, they go, ‘It’s not like he wrote that joke, but he said that joke, but he didn’t write that joke. Somebody wrote that joke and he said it.’”
“If Trump was at a roast on Thursday, you would do that joke,” Carolla added. “Well, if he’d never been president, you would do that joke.”
On Monday, following the assassination attempt at Saturday night’s event, Trump slammed Kimmel on Truth Social, writing, “He then stated, ‘Our First Lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.’ A day later a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, loaded up with a shotgun, handgun, and many knives. He was there for a very obvious and sinister reason. I appreciate that so many people are incensed by Kimmel’s despicable call to violence, and normally would not be responsive to anything that he said but, this is something far beyond the pale. Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.”
During the Monday episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host did not apologize for the joke, and pushed back at Melania and the president’s request: “You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and the first lady puts out a statement demanding you be fired from your job? We’ve all been there, right?”
The Federal Communications Commission, on Tuesday, then launched an early review of Disney‘s broadcast TV licenses. However, a Disney spokesperson told THR they were “confident that record demonstrates our continued qualifications as licensees under the Communications Act and the First Amendment and are prepared to show that through the appropriate legal channels. Our focus remains, as always, on serving viewers in the local communities where our stations operate.”
The backlash follows controversy Kimmel faced in September for comments he made in the wake of the shooting of Charlie Kirk. “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said in his monologue at the time.
On Sept. 17, Jimmy Kimmel Live! was pulled from the air, but returned a few days later on Sept. 23, after Nexstar and Sinclair threatened to keep the show from their stations.
Carolla similarly defended Kimmel in the wake of the September suspension, noting, “The right and the left are always sort of misinterpreting things. He was inaccurate about something. It wasn’t like he was necessarily attacking Charlie Kirk. He was trying to dump it on Trump and inaccurate about it.”
