Jimmy Kimmel’s buddy and former Man Show co-host Adam Carolla thinks his MAGA pals should give the late-night host a break over his “expectant widow” crack on Melania.
“That’s a pretty typical roast joke,” Carolla said on his podcast, The Adam Carolla Show. “It is also a trope—any younger, beautiful woman who’s married to an older guy, especially if the guy’s rumored to be sort of douchey, you would make that joke at any roast,” he also said, answering in the affirmative when his co-host, Elisha Krauss, asked if he would make that joke to Donald Trump’s face himself. “Well, if he’d never been president.”
“It’s kind of a thing where you go like, ‘Oh, that Elisha Krauss, I hate that b---h, I hope she dies.’ And then two days later, you get in a car crash, and you die,” Carolla said, by way of analogy. “And then everyone looks at me and goes, ‘Now, I’m angry at you—me.’ But I’m like, ‘But if she never got in a car crash, you’d have never said anything.’ Like, this thing happened, then the joke happened before.”
He added, “When you make a joke, and then nothing happens—like there was no shooting. No one made a thing about it before the shooting.”
Carolla’s comments come as Trump’s FCC makes moves to suspend ABC’s licenses in retaliation for Kimmel’s Thursday night quip about the first lady. Days later, after the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Mrs. Trump resurfaced Kimmel’s quip, calling it an example of his “hateful and violent rhetoric,” and calling for ABC to fire the late-night host. “Enough is enough,” she wrote in a post to X.
Kimmel responded during his Monday night monologue. “It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination,” the host said, “And they know that. I’ve been very vocal for many years, speaking out against gun violence, in particular.” He added, “I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject. I do. And I think a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with your husband about it.”
Carolla didn’t go as far in his defense of Kimmel on the topic, telling Krauss that he was approaching the situation “from a comedic standpoint.”
The pair have maintained their long friendship for decades, despite their political differences. Carolla explained why in January.
“Jimmy knows who I am on a very deep and intimate level,” he told the Will Cain Country podcast. “You wouldn’t cut the person off because he supported somebody you disagreed with if you knew that person was a good person,” he went on. “Jimmy knows me, and he knows I’m not horrible. So, I would assume he thinks I’m misguided.”
Kimmel told Michelle Obama on her podcast earlier this month, “I have some very close friends who think very differently, and I’m OK with that. I understand that people have different life experiences and believe things...I know I personally believed certain things to be true for a long time in my life, and realized that they weren’t. And you have to allow for that.”
Carolla remains a staunch supporter of Trump, and though he doesn’t believe Kimmel was making light of Trump’s assassination attempts with his “widow” comment, he still believes the “left” is to blame.
“It’s just kind of this weird thing that they always put racism on the right and violence on the right, but the reality is it’s on the left,” he said on Monday.
