Jimmy Kimmel opened Monday’s ABC network sessions at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, currently underway in Los Angeles, and addressed the horrific mass shootings that took place in Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas over the weekend.
“As you know it’s horrible and there’s an expectation that late-night talk shows will address these horrible things and I wish we didn’t have to but nobody is doing anything about it at all and we seem to forget about these tragedies four days after they happen,” the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host told reporters, as reported by Entertainment Weekly.
“My hope always in situations that I know I don’t have any thoughts that are new or groundbreaking… but to just remind people that 97 per cent of Americans believe we should have background checks for purchases at gun shows and our politicians don’t seem to care about what we think anymore,” he added.
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Asked about how much political commentary late-night comedy hosts should be offering, Kimmel admitted that he and his contemporaries really don’t have a choice.
“David Letterman got that ball rolling then Jon Stewart said — and still continues to say — a lot of important things. I just don’t know what alternative there is,” Kimmel added. “You watch the news all day and see what’s going on, how do you walk on stage and ignore it? I wish I could. It’s hard to talk about serious subjects… I want to be funny. When people watch a late-night television show people feel like they know you want to know what you think … I wish we didn’t have to do it so frequently.”
Another question asked whether he’d ever consider running for office, and Kimmel did not have to think about it before offering his answer.
“I will never run for office,” he declared. “I was the coach of my son’s basketball team and I couldn’t deal with that — all the parents coming up trying to get their kids more [time in the game] … and I would be like, ‘You want to coach this team?!’ And I feel like I would be like that… somehow I’ve become an example of political correctness and I’m not at all. There are just certain things that are so crazy I can’t believe we’re not all screaming about them 24 hours a day.”
