Late-night TV legend Conan O'Brien has broken his usual silence on politics to speak out in defense of Jimmy Kimmel after his show was suspended following comments he made in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
"The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and the promise to silence other late night hosts for criticizing the administration should disturb everyone on the right, left, and center. It’s wrong and anyone with a conscience knows it’s wrong," the veteran talk show host said on X Friday.
It was a rare venture into hot-button issues for O'Brien, who has long said he prefers to leave political commentary to other comedians and has criticized boilerplate anti-Trump barbs in the past.
But this week he joined fellow late night hosts David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert in standing by Kimmel. ABC confirmed that Kimmel’s show would be suspended “indefinitely” after the comedian said the “MAGA gang” was trying to “score political points” from the fatal shooting of Kirk during his Monday monologue. Kimmel did not mock or celebrate Kirk's death, which he previously condemned as "senseless murder".
Federal Communications Commission Chair, Brendan Carr, said Wednesday that Kimmel had misled viewers about the alleged shooter’s MAGA affiliation. Carr also raised the possibility that the FCC could revoke the broadcast licenses of local television stations that carry such “garbage.”
Protesters descended on ABC's parent company Disney and on Kimmel's Los Angeles studio Thursday, even as Trump insisted he had the right to yank networks' broadcast licenses if they criticize him too much.
“All they do is hit Trump,” the president said. “They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”
Rolling Stone also reported that multiple ABC executives did not feel Kimmel had crossed the line but were worried about retaliation from the Trump administration.
Numerous actors, celebrities, journalists, and politicians have rallied behind Kimmel, with roughly half of Americans telling pollsters that they disapproved of the decision to axe him.
"With an autocrat, you cannot give an inch. If ABC thinks that this is going to satisfy the regime, they are woefully naive," said Stephen Colbert, whose Late Show was cancelled by CBS after parent company Paramount took steps to appease President Donald Trump during its mega-merger with production company Skydance last month.
Jon Stewart hosted a rare mid-week episode of The Daily Show Thursday, lampooning Trump's behavior, and pretended to be a "patriotically obedient" and "administration-compliant" state-sponsored broadcast in the style of authoritarian countries such as North Korea.
Meanwhile Carr continued to threaten TV networks, saying he felt it would be "worthwhile" to have the federal government investigate whether ABC's daytime talk show The View is breaking broadcast rules.
O'Brien's political interventions have been rare in the past. "If I do anything that's remotely political or remotely about me having an opinion, I want it to be organic. I don't want it to be something that I'm trying to do," he told Esquire in 2016.
In 2023 he quipped that Trump's "greatest crime" was inspiring bad and derivative comedy, saying: "'Doesn’t [Trump] suck?’ isn’t a joke.”
Before hosting the Oscars earlier this year, O’Brien said: "I think as host I cannot ignore the moment we're in right now, but also it's threading a needle. I want to do [politics] with humor and also make sure the night doesn't drift into only about that."
But in 2020, near the end of Trump's first term, he interviewed Hillary Clinton on his podcast, saying: "You do not have to be an ethicist to know that this President has completely undermined the norms of human behavior."
In June 2025 he also spoke out in sympathy of Los Angeles’ immigrant community amid widespread ICE raids, saying: “They’re doing all the work.”
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