Comedian Jimmy Kimmel finally facing cancellation after blackface & ‘n-word’ tapes shatter ‘woke’ reinvention

Calls to “cancel” late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel over blackface routines and past racial slurs have reached fever pitch, as his efforts to reinvent himself as “America’s conscience” are dashed on the rocks of his own hypocrisy.

Kimmel’s critics have pounced on newly-unearthed tapes of a 1996 Snoop Dogg parody in which he repeatedly drops the “n-word” and a 2013 podcast featuring him impersonating black comic George Wallace. In the second clip, podcast host Adam Carolla additionally refers to Kimmel deploying his “crazy black voice” to portray Wallace – indicating it was a routine the comedian performed regularly. Both were posted by Fox News on Monday.

Already struggling with the reemergence of multiple blackface skits from his five-year stint as host of the Man Show, Kimmel announced last week that he was “taking this summer off to spend even more time with [his] family” – declining to mention the burgeoning blackface controversy even as his fellow late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon was forced to apologize for a blackface scandal of his own.

Kimmel has been subject to calls for cancellation before – five years helming a show that featured well-endowed bikini-clad women jumping on trampolines in its opening sequence was bound to generate outrage in the #MeToo era. Many criticized the decision for him to host the 2018 Oscars, the first post-Harvey Weinstein awards ceremony.

But the comic somehow weaseled out of the sexual reckoning without a scratch, even managing to turn himself into “America’s conscience” (in the eyes of CNN, but still) by going full-on political with his show, crying on cue, and launching regular attacks on President Donald Trump. There was also some historical revisionism involved: Kimmel would later claim the Man Show’s wet T-shirt contest antics, casual misogyny, and, yes, oodles of blackface, as satire – he was laughing at the audience, not with them, he told Vulture in 2017.

In a particularly ironic moment of virtue-signaling, the new and improved woke Kimmel called for actor Tom Arnold to release a tape he claimed to have in his possession of Trump saying the “n-word.” While that tape never surfaced, Kimmel has now been resoundingly hoisted on his own petard.

Many of the people who might have once watched the Man Show – only for him to throw them under the bus as redneck troglodytes – are relishing the calls for the comedian’s cancellation. Racism and misogyny may not offend everyone equally, but hypocrisy is a deal-killer no matter where one sits on the political spectrum.

The #MeToo crowd who wanted Kimmel gone years ago never gave up, either, and have joined the cancellation chorus this time around. While it remains to be seen if the comedians un-personed during 2020’s mini-cultural-revolution are able to mount a comeback, Kimmel hasn’t been cancelled yet – he’s still due to host this year’s Emmys.

Kimmel finally released a statement on Tuesday, though it was as much an attack on his critics as an apology, as he wrote: “it is frustrating that these thoughtless moments have become a weapon used by some to diminish my criticisms of social and other injustices.”

Can three months vacation plus some laser-focused groveling spare him the fate of so many of his colleagues, or will he return to work in September to find he’s been replaced with a newer, woke-er model?

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