Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t been funny since he was ogling women on trampolines on The Man Show 25 years ago. Maybe he was never funny. Yet Tuesday night, standing before a roaring crowd after his show’s six-day suspension following his distasteful remarks about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the perpetually mediocre talk show host managed something remarkable: he made himself matter again, even if just for a brief moment.

The suspension should have been the final nail in Kimmel’s professional coffin after years of failing upwards. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr had threatened ABC with licence revocation if it kept airing him after his comments about Kirk’s killer. Less than a week ago, Kimmel accused the “MAGA gang” of “desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it”.

Nexstar and Sinclair, controlling about 20% of ABC’s affiliate reach, pulled his show. Disney executives caved, yanking Kimmel “indefinitely”. For a comedian whose nightly viewership of 1.6 million already trailed Greg Gutfeld’s 3.29 million on Fox, this looked like the end.

Instead, less than a week later, an emotional Kimmel returned to the studio fighting back tears as he delivered his most coherent performance in years. “Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke,” he said, after thanking an unlikely coalition of supporters including Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. When he played Cruz’s defence of free speech, the audience laughed at his quip that he’d never agreed with Cruz before, but the Texas senator was “absolutely right”.

The monologue itself was competent television: huge crowd reaction, a choked-up apology monologue, wedged between attacks on government overreach and jokes about Trump potentially releasing the Epstein files “to distract from this”. After quoting Carr’s own 2022 praise for political satire as “one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech,” Kimmel landed his sharpest blow: “[Trump] did his best to cancel me. Instead, he forced millions of people to watch the show. That backfired bigly.”

Joe Rogan broke his silence Tuesday to support Kimmel, telling his podcast audience that conservatives celebrating the suspension were “crazy”. “I definitely don’t think that the government should be involved ever in dictating what a comedian can or cannot say in a monologue. That’s crazy,” Rogan said. “All this does is help him. It makes his show bigger.”

Rogan’s right about the boost. According to media outlets, Tuesday’s episode likely drew Kimmel’s largest audience in years, even without those boycotting affiliates. More importantly, it transformed him from another failing liberal comedian into something approaching a free speech hero. He even defended the recently cancelled Stephen Colbert and warned that Trump was now targeting Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.

Trump himself seemed rattled by the reversal. Before Tuesday’s taping, he posted frantically on social media: “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back… I think we’re going to test ABC out on this.” But if ratings continue to soar due to resistance rather than compliance, other channels may just find there’s more space for liberal comedians in the Trump era than they first thought.

Whether this marks a genuine turning point remains unclear. The late-night host could easily squander his newfound relevance by returning to his usual mediocrity. For now, though, Jimmy Kimmel — unfunny, irrelevant Jimmy Kimmel — has given the media landscape something to consider: resistance might actually be good business when it draws support from a united front of liberals mourning democracy and conservatives defending free speech principles.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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