Jimmy Kimmel’s unexpected evolution

Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t want to be talking about health care so much, but here he is, smack dab in the middle of a debate he very obviously hates.

On September 20, during his monologue, Kimmel took a breath in the middle of trying to explain the ramshackle Graham-Cassidy health care bill currently up for consideration in the Senate, and looked out at his audience. “Listen: Health care is complicated,” he said. “It’s boring. I don’t want to talk about it. The details are confusing — and that’s what these guys are relying on. They’re counting on you to be so overwhelmed with all the information [that] you just trust them to take care of it. Well, they’re not taking care of you. They’re taking care of the people who give them money.”

On September 21, Kimmel went a step further, Listing yet again the many, many medical associations that have come out against the Graham-Cassidy bill, Kimmel threw up his hands and said, “We haven’t seen this many people come out to speak against a bill since Cosby.”

Strong words, but not anything that people who have been watching Kimmel lately can be surprised by, after months of the late-night host slamming each and every frantic Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. After Kimmel’s newborn son required open-heart surgery in April, the host realized that if Obamacare were repealed, lifetime caps on health care spending could return, and his family — and so many others — could get screwed by having to spend thousands of dollars out of pocket to ensure their loved ones are cared for. At the time, Kimmel gave an impassioned, tearful monologue about making sure his son received the care he needed and about just how important it was that his family had reasonable health insurance.

That monologue became an instant sensation, getting the attention of not just his viewers and angry people on the internet but also the very Republican senators he was calling out for holding people’s lives in the balance. Sen. Bill Cassidy even appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live afterward to define “the Jimmy Kimmel test” for future health care legislation, which would mandate that the bill ensure that “no family should be denied medical care, emergency or otherwise, because they can’t afford it.”

Now, however, Cassidy is trying to push through an extreme new health care bill that would turn over incredible responsibility to the states and, essentially, blow up the health insurance system as we know it — and Kimmel, who before this has never made biting political commentary his comedic bread and butter, doesn’t want to let him get away with it. This week alone, he gave three searing monologues about the Graham-Cassidy bill, refusing to blink in the face of Republicans telling him to sit down, shut up, and let “the experts” handle it.

“I never thought I’d get involved in something like this,” Kimmel said on September 19, dumbfounded. “This is not my area of expertise. My area of expertise is eating pizza, and that’s about it. But we can’t keep letting them do this to our children, our senior citizens, our veterans, or to any of us.”

This blatant hypocrisy has him pissed, sure, but even more than that, he seems just plain fed up with the whole ordeal. All three of his monologues this week make clear that he would love to drop the sincere pleas and keep making people laugh. But as he sees it, the overall cruelty of these health care proposals — which affect him personally — gives him no choice but to return to the same dry subject over and over again.

Prior to President Trump taking office, Jimmy Kimmel Live would take on politics from time to time, though never in earnest monologues like the one that put Kimmel at the forefront of the health care discussion. Instead, the show tended to approach politicians with the same instinct it applied to uninformed people wandering down Hollywood Boulevard: wryly pointing out how stupid they could be. For a long while, in fact, Kimmel was best known as the late-night host who would spotlight a ridiculous viral video — like 2013’s “Worst Twerk Fail EVER - Girl Catches Fire — only to reveal himself as the puppet master behind it.

Since Jimmy Kimmel Live debuted in 2003, the vast majority of the show has been devoted to snarking on pop culture, putting on live concerts, and making ABC happy with constant analysis of the Bachelor franchise. Kimmel pulls pranks and highlights other people’s pranks when they manage to impress him. He puts people on the spot with sporadic games, which can be fun and loose or veer into something a little crueler (e.g., “Foreigner Or Not?”).

But over the past several months, even some of his more overtly silly regular segments have found sharper political teeth. “How Many Americans Know Where North Korea Is?” forced people on the street to face the fact that they had strong opinions about a country they know almost nothing about. His signature “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” segment recently got a cheeky remix into something a little more pointed, when he read “Mean Comments From Trump Supporters” after he got flak for a particularly critical monologue he did after the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Like most late-night hosts this year, Kimmel has found himself unable to turn away from politics — or, more accurately, the bizarre reality that is President Donald Trump. And when his son was born earlier this year and almost immediately required three open-heart surgeries, Kimmel was unable to ignore the issue that had presented itself in such a horrific way on his doorstep.

So he didn’t — and he launched himself into the conversation with unprecedented candor that took almost everyone, perhaps especially himself, by surprise.

This honest, vulnerable Kimmel wasn’t like any iteration of himself he’d shown viewers before. Kimmel — who first came up in comedy through co-hosting The Man Show with Adam Carolla — usually delivers punchlines with a bemused-seeming laugh that masks their acidic sarcasm. He’s like the quickest guy in the frat, with a mean streak matched only by his fierce affection for those he cares about.

But it’s exactly that affection — or, perhaps more accurately, loyalty — that’s forced Kimmel to step outside his comfort zone and face something as serious as health care head on. Having an issue hit this close to home has made it impossible for him to ignore or shrug off political news. So he keeps coming back to this dry issue time and time again, even when he barely has any jokes to tell about it.

And while some have criticized him for “politicizing” his son’s condition, Kimmel addressed them too, pain spiking his indignant delivery on September 19. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I am politicizing my son’s health problems, because I have to.”

But of course, Kimmel doesn’t have to do anything. The difference with his approach to this particular issue, it seems, is that he wants to.

Even as Kimmel leans more into covering the news of the day with increasingly pointed jokes, his instinct has never been to explode in righteous rage. In fact, he doesn’t express his horror about political developments — which has grown more and more obvious over the course of Trump’s first year in office — quite like anyone else in late night.

Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee launch weaponized jokes from a baseline of anger; John Oliver sputters panicked warnings; Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah impart the gravity of their words with grim deadpans. Kimmel may very well feel angry, panicked, and grim, especially in the face of Republicans’ ongoing attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare. More than anything, though, the main emotion he conveys while tearing into political hypocrisy is complete and utter frustration. Like he said: He doesn’t want to be talking about this at all.

But Kimmel has found himself at the center of an ugly fight for the heart of American health care — and to his credit, he’s going to fight for it as best he can while he’s there.