OPINION:
Mocking someone in front of an audience is one of the easiest ways to win a laugh — and one of the quickest ways to strip a person of dignity (“Kimmel defends ‘expectant widow’ joke as Trump demands his firing,” Web, April 28).
When the target is widely disliked by those you wish to amuse, it can even feel righteous. Add a crowd, and restraint disappears.
What starts as humor turns into something closer to ritualized contempt.
Repeat it night after night, and the line between comedy and fixation erodes. The audience comes not for insight but for the familiar hit.
As with any habit, it requires escalation. The jokes get sharper, the portrayals more distorted, until the subject is no longer a person but a prop, flattened into a caricature for easy applause.
At that point, nothing interrupts the performance. Not context, not proportion, not even events that would ordinarily demand a pause. The joke no longer responds to reality; it simply feeds on itself.
And eventually, it collapses.
This is the hazard of building a platform on relentless ridicule: It has nowhere to go. Audiences tire of the repetition or begin to notice the emptiness behind it.
Goodbye, Jimmy Kimmel. The well finally ran dry. It wasn’t President Trump who ended it; it was the limits of the act itself.
SCOTT THOMPSON
Bloomington, Indiana
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