Jimmy Kimmel’s return to ABC on Tuesday night was met with rapturous applause, and while his monologue was at once emotional, incisive and playful as he addressed the uproar over his comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassin and the backlash to ABC pulling him from the air, he chose his opening words carefully in a nod to another late night host who was embroiled in controversy over network censorship.
“Anyway, as I was saying before I was interrupted,” Kimmel said at the top of his first show back after being off the air for four days, a line that was identical to how “Tonight Show” host Jack Paar addressed his audience in 1960 after he abruptly walked off his NBC show a month prior.
In February 1960, Paar was telling a joke about a woman and a bathroom, but network censors pulled the joke from the broadcast and instead replaced it with news coverage. They didn’t tell Paar of their decision, so on the following day’s show, Paar abruptly quit “The Tonight Show.”
“I am leaving ‘The Tonight Show.’ There must be a better way of making a living than this. There’s a way of entertaining people without being constantly involved in some form of controversy which is on me all the time,” Paar said. “It’s rough on my wife and child, and I don’t need it. I like the National Broadcasting Company, they’ve been swell to me. And I’ve been pretty wonderful to them. I took over a show with 60 stations. There is now 158. This show is sold out. It’s the highest, I think, money producer for this network. And I believe I was let down by this network at a time when I could have used their help. You have been peachy to me always.”
With that, he got up and walked off the set, leaving announcer Hugh Downs to finish the program.
Nearly a month later, Paar was urged to come back to “The Tonight Show” and finally returned on March 7, 1960. In his first words back on air, Paar said, “As I was saying before I was interrupted…”
The joke was met with wild applause, just as Kimmel’s return was. And it must be noted that my colleague Brian Lowry predicted Kimmel might mark his first night back on the air by echoing Paar.
Disney CEO Bob Iger and Disney co-chairman Dana Walden decided to put Kimmel back on the air Tuesday after days of discussions with the late-night host, ultimately doing so without the buy-in of affiliate station owners Sinclair and Nexstar who refused to air Kimmel’s return.
While Kimmel stopped short of apologizing for his remarks last week that caused an uproar in conservative media, he got emotional while talking about the reaction.
Holding back tears, he told his audience: “It was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man.” He also thanked those who spoke out about the show’s suspension, regardless of where they stand in a fractured American political landscape.
But Kimmel also directly addressed the assault on free speech that ensued, as FCC chairman Brendan Carr urged the stations to take action against Kimmel after Donald Trump had threatened that he was next to be canceled after Stephen Colbert.
“[Disney] welcomed me back on the air, and I thank them for that. Unfortunately, and I think unjustly, this puts them at risk. The President of the United States made it very clear he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here fired from our jobs,” Kimmel said in his opening monologue. “Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke. He was somehow able to squeeze Colbert out of CBS, then he turned his sights on me, and now he’s openly rooting for NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers and the hundreds of Americans who work for their shows who don’t make millions of dollars.”
Kimmel continued: “I hope that if that happens, or if there’s even any hint of that happening, you will be 10 times as loud as you were this week. We have to speak out against this. He’s not stopping, and it’s not just comedy. He’s gunning for our journalists too, he’s suing them, he’s bullying them. Look, I never imagined I’d be in a situation like this. I barely paid attention in school. One thing I did learn from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Howard Stern is that a government threat to silence a comedian the president doesn’t like is anti-American.”
