It Used to Be Liberals Who Wanted to Cancel Jimmy Kimmel

For years now, Jimmy Kimmel has been the face of smug, self-satisfied liberalism, at least in the eyes of his conservative critics. Few comics have been meaner to Donald Trump than Kimmel, resulting in much rejoicing on the right when the comedian was (temporarily) removed from the airwaves last week.

The irony? Those same conservative haters were probably big fans of The Man Show, Kimmel’s 1999 Comedy Central show alongside Adam Carolla. The two regular guys knew, according to Variety, that all men wanted was “a good beer, a good buzz, a good ballgame and a good bonk while locking in visually on nature’s greatest wonder: cleavage.”

Other mainstream critics clutched their pearls at the testosterone-powered comedy fest, “a joyous celebration of chauvinism,” according to Kimmel himself.  Entertainment Weekly called his Man Show “sexist” and “boorish.” Kimmel didn’t care, celebrating topics like the aforementioned beer, boobs and bodily functions. “You couldn’t make a show more perfect for us,” he said. “Everything on this show is what Adam and I talk about at lunch every day.”

All those comedy fans who complain that you can’t joke about anything anymore must long for the days of The Man Show, when Kimmel and Carolla could ogle busty broads to their hearts’ content. They made fun of women who hated the show, doing a sketch in which furious ladies start off protesting before stripping off their clothes and mud wrestling for the boys’ leering entertainment. 

Liberals who hated Kimmel’s sexist jokes (he’d later claim they were “satire”) also weren’t nuts about his forays into blackface, including multiple bits where he played Oprah Winfrey and Utah Jazz forward Karl Malone.

Those characters brought heat, but not in real time. Footage of Kimmel’s old Man Show clips went viral in 2020, riling social justice warriors who let the comedian (and Sarah Silverman and Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon) know that blackface is never cool, even when done for comic purposes. Kimmel offered one of those “Sorry if you were offended” apologies: “There is nothing more important to me than your respect, and I apologize to those who were genuinely hurt or offended by the makeup I wore or the words I spoke,” he said in a statement. 

Kimmel knows he’s done plenty to anger both sides of the culture wars. The guy who championed the #MeToo movement as an Oscars host was also the Man Show comedian who invited women on the street to guess what he’d stuffed in his pants, recommending they use both hands to solve the riddle. 

Now he has to live with the consequences of his two-sided comic persona, with conservatives pointing to Kimmel’s old comedy as an example of the kind of message he’d fight against today. “It’s fair game,” he told Rolling Stone earlier this year. “I think it’s kind of funny, because the very people who are using those (Man Show) videos as an example of why I’m a horrible person were probably the biggest fans of the show at that time.”