Comedian Adam Carolla defended his friend Jimmy Kimmel over President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump’s calls for the late night host to be fired over a joke comparing the latter to an “expectant widow,” arguing the joke only sparked such ire after an unrelated shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“That’s a pretty typical roast joke,” Carolla said on his podcast, “The Adam Carolla Show,” on Wednesday. “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.”
Kimmel made the joke during a Thursday “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” monologue spoofing the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, days before the actual dinner was shut down after a gunman stormed the building with multiple weapons. The first couple have since called for Disney and ABC to fire Kimmel, though the network has kept him on the air. The Federal Communications Commission has since demanded Disney’s local ABC stations file for an early review of their broadcast licenses, though it has claimed the request was not over Kimmel.
“When you make a joke and then nothing happens, like there was no shooting, no one made a thing about it before the shooting,” said Carolla, who is more right-leaning. “So then it’s kind of a thing where you go, like, ‘Oh, that Elisha Krauss, I hate that b—h, 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.’ But I’m like, if she never got in a car crash, you never said anything.”
Carolla, who co-hosted “The Man Show” with Kimmel from 1999 to 2003, said there were two factors at play in Kimmel’s joke: “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. Well, if he’d never been president, you would do that joke.”
Carolla previously came to Kimmel’s defense last September, when conservatives’ anger over a joke Kimmel made following Charlie Kirk’s death helped push Disney to temporarily suspend the late-night host. Carolla called Kimmel “a very good guy and a generous guy” and said “the right and the left are always sort of misinterpreting things.”
