James Comer Defends Kimmel’s ‘Tasteless’ Trump Widow Joke | EUROtoday

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) broke with President Donald Trump and his MAGA faction as he defended late night time host Jimmy Kimmel amid right-wing stress for him to be fired over a joke calling first girl Melania Trump an “expectant widow.”

“I don’t want to cancel comedy. I believe in freedom of speech,” he instructed NewsNation on Wednesday. “I think that was, you know, a lot of Kimmel’s jokes are tasteless and probably borderline inappropriate. But the end of the day, he has a right to do that. And the viewers, if they don’t like it, they can turn the channel.”

Comer then urged the Federal Communications Commission to rethink its demand for Disney to file broadcasting license renewals for eight of its native ABC stations years earlier than they had been initially set to run out.

“I would hope that if my friend [FCC chair] Brendan Carr is looking at something on ABC, it has more to do than with a tasteless joke, so hopefully we can move on,” the Kentucky lawmaker mentioned.

Calling himself “a big fan of comedy,” Comer added, “All the comedians, and I know a lot of them, feel like many people, usually from the left, have kind of canceled comedy, and I think that’s unfortunate.”

The congressman, who’s chair of the House Oversight Committee, did say he hoped Kimmel would pull again on the darkish humor, nonetheless, telling NewsNation, “I think that gets a lot of people jacked up, and I think that contributes to the rise in political violence that we’re seeing.”

Kimmel is being accused of stoking violence by quipping that the primary girl had the glow of an “expectant widow” in a sketch that aired days earlier than a shooter tried to ambush a Washington, D.C., dinner that Trump and a number of other key Cabinet members had been attending.

Defending himself from backlash from the president, his spouse and different right-wing figures throughout his Monday present, Kimmel known as the remark a “very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am.

“It was not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination,” he mentioned. “And they know that. I’ve been very vocal for many years, speaking out against gun violence in particular.”