Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel found it pretty amusing conservative Newsmax commentators are blaming Rudy Giuliani’s hospitalization on him.
The finger-pointing started after a joke Kimmel made from last week when he said Giuliani was “rising from the grave.”
The former mayor of New York City was then admitted to a Florida hospital over the weekend in critical condition on battling pneumonia.
On Monday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” the host spoke about the claims by right-wing media that jumped to conclusions in like in April, when a White House Correspondents’ Dinner skit that called First Lady Melania Trump an “expectant widow”just before a shooting at the event.
Regarding Giuliani, Kimmel said, “When I read this, I thought, I really thought. I said, I wonder if they’ll try to blame this on me.”
“And then, sure enough, one of these podcast bozos points to a joke I made about Rudy on Thursday about him being a vampire and then suggests I might actually have some inside knowledge of what’s going on in Trumptown there,” Kimmel said.
Kimmel spoke of Newsmax’s coverage of the Giuliani joke. Panelists questioned whether the joke was appropriate.
One asked, “Is this supposed to be comedy?” while another said, “He’s really not funny,” and described the remark as “abhorrent” and accused Kimmel of operating under the “gauze of comedy.”
Kimmel then leaned into the phrase and staged a gag in which he appeared beneath a literal sheet of gauze held up by performers.
“Right. In fact, I’m under the gauze of comedy right now,” he said.
He added the “gauze” granted him the ability to foresee events before they happen.
“Every day in the morning, I wake up, I make coffee, and then I look into the future to see which events have yet to occur and then we write jokes we know are going to make trouble,” he said.
“For the record, I hope Rudy Giuliani lives another 100 years,” he added before referencing Giuliani’s mocked press conference outside a landscaping business in Philadelphia.
