Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. praised a viral satirical X thread about Stephen Colbert, late-night TV, and the decline of liberal comedy, Saturday, using the post to aim at Jimmy Kimmel as “The Late Show” era comes to an end.
Kennedy framed the post as an explanation for why Kimmel has drawn backlash from conservatives over comments about his job as a comedian.
“Superb dissection of the shocking collapse of liberal comedy,” Kennedy wrote. “This is the best explanation of how we’ve reached the point where Late Night host Jimmy Kimmel can say, ‘It’s not my job to be funny.’ As this author shows, he was hired as a comedian, but he made himself a priest.”
The post Kennedy amplified was a satirical piece, written by Peter Girnus, who wrote the post as a fictional “Senior Vice President of Late Night Strategy at CBS.”
Girnus centered the satire on Colbert’s shift from his Comedy Central character to his late-show persona. “We killed the character and put the real man on stage. The real man was a lecturer. Earnest. Thoughtful. Correct about everything,” Girnus wrote. “Correct is not funny.”
After Kennedy’s praise, Girnus followed up by arguing that the problem was not just one host, but a culture that punished jokes outside liberal orthodoxy.