Jimmy Kimmel was back on the air Tuesday night after being suspended last week by ABC’s parent company, the Walt Disney Company, following pressure from President Donald Trump and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. Kimmel addressed the controversy surrounding his comments a week earlier, denounced political violence, stressed how important it was to stand up for free speech in the U.S., and then went right back to mocking Trump, who tweeted about Kimmel shortly before the episode had even aired.

Kimmel’s monologue Tuesday, which is available on YouTube, struck the right tone in an environment where it was unclear if the late night host would need to show subservience to Trump in order to get his job back. It seems like just about every other high-profile figure with something to lose has bowed down to Trump when it mattered.

Big tech executives recently went around the table praising the vapid authoritarian; Columbia University paid $200 million to make bogus charges of anti-semitism go away; and CBS’s parent company shelled out $16 million in what may as well have been a quid pro quo to get Paramount’s merger with SkyDance approved. It’s all been so undignified.

But Kimmel never kissed Trump’s ass on Tuesday night and didn’t formally apologize for what he said last week, instead explaining that he understood how people could have taken what he said the wrong way. Kimmel was earnest and heartfelt without appeasing the fascists that seem to have infiltrated every corner of Washington D.C. during Trump’s second term.

What was the scandal again?

The supposed “scandal” that started it all was perplexing. It was ostensibly about MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, who was murdered on Sept. 10 while debating college kids in Utah.

During his show on Monday, Sept. 15, Kimmel said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

It was the lead-in to a joke about Trump, and you can watch the entire one-minute segment below. But that short line was the entirety of the controversy. And most conservative news outlets talking about Kimmel’s comments didn’t even bother to play the clip for viewers.

We can do this the easy way or the hard way

The comments didn’t really get any widespread notice until FCC chairman Carr appeared on the streaming show of MAGA influencer Benny Johnson two days later. And Kimmel addressed Carr’s mob-like tactics during his own show on Tuesday.

“Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, telling an American company ‘we can do this the easy way or the hard way’ —and that these companies can find ways to change conduct or take action on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead—in addition to being a direct violation of the First Amendment, is not a particularly intelligent threat to make in public,” Kimmel said.

“Ted Cruz said he sounded like a mafioso,” Kimmel continued. “Although I don’t know, if you want to hear a mob boss make a threat like that, you have to hide a microphone in a deli and park outside in a van with a tape recorder all night long. This genius said it on a podcast.”

Kimmel reluctantly gave Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, some credit for saying that the U.S. government shouldn’t dictate what people are allowed to hear. He also discussed the other late-night hosts, as well as the support he received from people around the world.

On the verge of tears

Kimmel said that he heard a lot of different things about what he was supposed to say in the lead-up to his comeback show, but brushed that off as something that wouldn’t really matter.

“I don’t think what I have to say is going to make much of a difference. If you like me, you like me. If you don’t, you don’t. I have no illusions about changing anyone’s mind. But I do want to make something clear, because it’s important to me as a human. And that is, you understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man,” Kimmel said, choking up.

Kimmel noted that he posted a message on Instagram the day Kirk was killed, sending love to his family, and also mentioned that he gets death threats and selfishly has every reason not to condone violence.

Kimmel wasn’t ‘back’ for a big chunk of the country

Kimmel also addressed the fact that even though he was back on the air, he wasn’t available everywhere, including markets like St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Nashville, New Orleans, and others. Kimmel’s show also isn’t airing in Washington, D.C., the market where President Television spends most of his time these days.

Why is Kimmel still banned in various cities? Two companies that own local stations across the country, Sinclair and Nextstar, didn’t air Jimmy Kimmel Live on Tuesday as they continue to pretend like Kimmel said something deeply offensive. Combined, the companies own about 22% of all ABC affiliates in the U.S., according to the Wall Street Journal. And it was local broadcasters that Carr said should squeeze people like Kimmel off the air.

It’s unclear how the conflict between ABC and the two media companies will be resolved, but Sinclair has demanded that Kimmel make an apology and a sizeable donation to Kirk’s political group, Turning Point USA. The host didn’t say anything about those demands on Tuesday.

The top fascist weighs in

Trump’s own tweet Tuesday night didn’t even bother to pretend like anything about Kimmel’s situation was really about Charlie Kirk.

“I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled!” Trump posted on Truth Social, without explaining precisely the kind of communications that have happened between Trump’s goons and ABC.

“Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his ‘talent’ was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE,” Trump continued.

Trump allies have repeatedly insisted that Kimmel wasn’t taken off the air at the president’s insistence. But someone should probably tell Trump that. Because he made a very convoluted argument in his tweet Tuesday making it clear that he would continue to go after Kimmel.

“He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution,” Trump continued. “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers! Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad Ratings.”

Trump made a similarly absurd argument about CBS and 60 Minutes giving “campaign contributions” to the Democrats before the company settled with Trump in what was widely viewed as a bribe.

Trump is coming for everybody

Kimmel didn’t publicly comment on anything while he was off the air until midday Tuesday, when he posted a photo of himself with Norman Lear on Bluesky and Instagram, which reads, “Missing this guy today.” Lear was a TV comedy legend who produced hit shows of the 1970s like All in the Family, Sanford and Son, and The Jeffersons. Lear died in 2023.

Kimmel’s social media post didn’t give any hint about how he would treat his suspension when it came time for the broadcast, but he clearly landed in the right place when all was said and done. And he talked a lot about the dangers that were ahead of us, describing how Stephen Colbert had been pushed out at CBS and showed a screenshot of an old Trump tweet explaining that Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers at NBC would be next. In case you forgot, Trump wrote that Kimmel was “next” back in July after CBS said it wouldn’t be renewing Colbert’s contract in the spring.

Kimmel stuck the landing

Arguably, the most important aspect of Kimmel’s monologue was that it ended with the same tone as other segments from the comedian in recent years. Which is to say that it was irreverent and made fun of Trump’s most idiotic comments from recent days. Kimmel played a montage of Trump’s press conference from Monday, where he repeatedly told Americans not to take Tylenol and poked fun at the president’s unhinged comments at the United Nations on Tuesday.

Kimmel also had Robert DeNiro appear for a segment where the legendary actor played the FCC chairman. DeNiro adopted the mob-boss swagger that we’ve seen him play in countless movies, and it worked exactly like you’d expect. It wasn’t the funniest thing in the world, but it landed a few punches and succeeded at eliciting some chuckles. That’s what late-night TV comedy has been about since its inception, and Kimmel made it clear that he would keep doing what he does best as long as ABC would let him.

Whether Trump and Carr let him keep at it is another matter. Because this obviously isn’t the end of Kimmel’s battle with censorship, as far as Trump is concerned. The president will continue to harass media companies until they’re sufficiently deferential. And there are no guarantees that Disney will stand up to Trump if push comes to shove in the future.

The Disney boycott and speech in America

At one point, Kimmel made a joke about something Disney was making him read to be allowed back on the air. He pulled out a sheet of paper and told people how to reactivate their Disney+ and Hulu accounts. And while it was clearly a joke, there was probably a lot of truth to what Kimmel was suggesting. Disney almost certainly saw the calls for boycotts and cancellations, as Gizmodo’s comment sections were filled with them. And it seems like a substantial number of people really did make good on the threats to cancel.

Without that massive public pressure, it seems very likely that Disney would’ve pulled the plug on Kimmel for good. Unfortunately, most people who make media aren’t quite as high-profile as Kimmel. And when folks like Rumeysa Ozturk get locked up for simply co-writing an op-ed about human rights, there’s no streaming service we can cancel to show our support.

But we have to take the wins where we get them. And while we don’t know what tomorrow holds, at least Kimmel got a national audience to make his case directly to the American people.

“Look, I never imagined I would be in a situation like this. I barely paid attention in school,” Kimmel said to laughs Tuesday night. “But 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.”