Jimmy Kimmel is not a very funny man.

He reminds me of the prep school boys I used to teach back in the 1990s. They had a snotty kind of humor, an ironic “I’m so smart, ha ha” type of affect that stops being cute when you are an adult making millions of dollars mocking people you don’t like.

It is certainly not satire of the classic model, the kind that such disparate but brilliant practitioners like Jack Parr, Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Tom Snyder, Charlie Rose, Joan Rivers, Larry King, or even the more caustic David Letterman practiced like Michelangelo behind a mic. The closest we have today to anything approaching that, and he is more Lenny Bruce than Carson, is Bill Maher, who has become my favorite host ever since he realized that he, like so many of us, is a man without a country

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