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| Screenshot via South China Morning Post, October 2013, |
The last time I had occasion to devote real time to thinking about the late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel was almost 12 years ago, when he was in trouble not for something he said on his show, but for his failure to respond to something a small child said, in a segment aired during the government shutdown of October 2013, which he called Kid's Table:
The offending remark came while Kimmel was talking to a group of children, ages 5 and 6, about the United States government’s debt, much of which is held by China.
“America owes China a lot of money, $1.3 trillion,” Kimmel told the children. “How should we pay them back?”
“Shoot cannons all the way over and kill everyone in China,” one boy said.
Or in this case, as he said afterwards, "Kid's Table, the Lord of the Flies edition". It was widely felt, in the Asian American community anyway, that he should at the very least have distanced himself from this bloodthirsty proposal in the followup, which was not quite what he did:
“Kill everyone in China? OK, that’s an interesting idea,” Kimmel said.
He then posed the question: “Should we allow the Chinese to live?”
While one boy said, “No,” most of the children said, “Yes.”
“If we don’t allow them to live, then they’ll try to kill us,” a girl said.
Normalizing the concept of permanent ineradicable hostility between the races. I don't know anything about the races of the kindergartners on the show, but I hope none of them were East Asian in origin—you can imagine how it would have gone if one of them was, how that child would have felt about the discussion, and then you can go on to understand that there were certainly people of East Asian origin watching the show at home.
Protests in Chinatown, protests in my own half-Chinese family, protests from the Chinese embassy, protests from my H-1B Chinese work colleague with the PhD from Urbana-Champaign, not normally in unison with the CPC, who got me to sign a petition, and ABC's swift damage control and Kimmel's apology, which was not too gracious ("I thought it was obvious that I didn't agree with that statement"), though I can see his point. A reviewer for KTAR radio in Phoenix said it was "poignant and hilarious" (just bumped into that one). Anyway that was the end to the controversy as far as I knew. Now I seem to be the only one who remembers it, though I did have to google to remember what it was about, and I may never have known that, because I find I'm seriously shocked by it now. Or could I really have thought it was OK back then? Could I have been resensitized by the explosion of anti-Chinese racism that came with the pandemic so that I now experience it in a different way? No reported pressure of any kind from the federal government, though, ABC seems to have been able to deal with it on a purely business basis.
I thought it would be helpful to have an example of a situation that Kimmel definitely handled badly before we go on to the case on which there is some disagreement.
His response to the September 10 killing of Kirk, in any case, wasn't at all "denigrating the memory of Charlie Kirk", as Stephen Bannon put it; he denounced the murder, as everyone should, and refrained from speaking ill of the victim. What aroused the criticism was what he said about Republican politicians, not involved in the murder one way or the other, but rushing to exploit the murder, starting with Donald Trump, who released a video on the night of September 10, before a suspect had even been identified, blaming it on the "radical left" and unnamed "organizations" that supposedly fund it;
