Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel thought he got the better of President Trump.
But then a reality check set in.
And a Hollywood star hit Jimmy Kimmel with a gut punch about why America stopped watching.
As American Media Watch Dog reports:
Comedian Theo Von hosts one of the most listened to podcasts in America.
Actor Vince Vaughn starred in comedy smash hit movies Old School, Wedding Crashers, and Dodgeball.
Von endorsed President Trump in 2024, and Vaughn is one of the few open conservatives in Hollywood.
Both know comedy, and both know Hollywood.
On a recent episode of Von’s podcast, the two savaged late-night hosts for morphing into partisan hitmen who only train their jokes at one group of people.
“You don’t want to become part of a group and feel like you’re a champion for one ideology. You want to make fun of everybody,” Vaughn stated.
Conan O’Brien describes the anti-Trump comics as engaging in “clapter,” meaning that the comic tells jokes not to be funny, but to affirm the audience’s left-wing political views.
Vaughn echoed that sentiment and explained to Von that Kimmel and other late-night hosts used their shows to denigrate Americans who didn’t agree with them politically.
“It’s more like, ‘We’re smart and got it figured out, and if you don’t agree, then you’re an idiot,’” Vaughn added. “There was definitely a culture that if you didn’t agree with these ideas, you were looked at as bad.”
Late-night talk shows are talking in the ratings now that Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers have abandoned the Johnny Carson and Jay Leno formula of playing it down the middle and now only cater to half the country.
CBS announced that this is Colbert’s last year, and Kimmel’s show is on life support.
Von said this strategy was just bad business.
“A lot of the late shows have struggled because … the only person they could make fun of at a certain point was white, redneck kind of people, and then everything tanked after that,” Von replied.
2024 was known as the “podcast election” because Trump drove turnout from irregular voters to the polls by appearing on Joe Rogan, Von, and other podcasts known to be popular with young, male voters.
Vaughn remarks that podcasts deliver bigger audiences than legacy institutions like late-night talk shows with a fraction of the cost.
Vaughn theorized that talk show hosts lost influence because they stopped reflecting the broader culture and sought to brainwash the audience into accepting their worldview as the one true belief.
“The podcasts have gotten so much more popular with less production, fewer writers, and fewer staff. And the reason is … people want authenticity,” Vaughn declared. “The talk shows, to a large part, became really agenda-based. They were going to evangelize people to what they thought. And so people just rejected it because it didn’t feel authentic. It felt like they had an agenda. It stopped being funny, and it started feeling like I was in a fucking class I didn’t want to take. I’m getting scolded.”
Many in the media blame cord-cutting and the movement toward streaming for the loss of audience and influence.
Vaughn rejected that excuse and attributed the decline of late-night talk shows to simply putting out a product that the larger audience rejected.
“The phenomenon isn’t what they say. They always blame technology, but the reality is it’s the approach,” Vaughn stated.
Vaughn credited the rise in the popularity of podcasts like Von’s to the authenticity of the hosts, the guests, and the conversation they engaged in.
“People are going to tune into a podcast more so because they want to feel like people are having a real conversation. It’s interesting to them,” Vaughn concluded. “But if you look at what happened to the talk shows and why their ratings are low, it’s got only to do with the fact of what you just said, which is they all became the same show. They all became so about their politics and who’s good and who’s bad.”
