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The cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel should set off alarm bells across the continent.

Love him or loathe him, Kimmel didn’t deserve to be axed by his own network. If his ratings were falling, fine—let him sink or swim in front of the audience, not under the weight of some corporate impulse to sanitize the airwaves. Shows should rise and fall on their own merit, not at the whim of executives deciding what the public can handle.

I’ve watched Kimmel, and I’ll admit it: the man was getting long in the tooth. The monologues felt recycled, the outrage performative. It was the same jokes night after night with the audience nodding along like it was gospel. But the point isn’t whether Kimmel was still funny. The point is that late-night talk shows have always been something more than entertainment. They have been cultural touchstones.

For generations, late-night hosts have been our unofficial town criers—part comic relief and part conscience. They digest the chaos of the day and spit it back out loud enough to slice through the noise and quiet enough to provide a moment of recognition. Late-night monologues are where politics, celebrity, and current events intersect in real time. It’s messy, it’s biased, it’s often absurd—but it’s also a pressure valve.

That’s what makes this cancellation so dangerous. It isn’t just about one celebrity losing a job. It’s about the message it sends: don’t speak out of turn. Don’t push boundaries. Don’t rock the boat.

Neil Postman saw this coming decades ago in Amusing Ourselves to Death. He warned that when news turns into entertainment, the lines between reality and performance blur—and that societies raised on spectacle risk losing the ability to separate serious ideas from shallow distractions. Rupert Murdoch didn’t just read Postman’s book; he built an empire off the very thing Postman feared. He understood that infotainment sells. Late-night comedy rode that same wave, becoming part of how millions of people grappled with the events of the day.

And yes, there’s a downside to that. We’ve come to rely too heavily on entertainers to explain the world to us. We trade critical thinking for punchlines that fit into 30-second clips. That’s not great for democracy either. But silencing those voices altogether? That’s worse.

Because here’s the thing: comedians have always been the canaries in the coal mine of free expression. The court jesters of old were the only ones allowed to mock the king without losing their heads. Their jokes carried truths no one else dared to say out loud. When you start cancelling jesters, you’re not just killing the joke, you’re killing the cultural space where dissent lives.

Yesterday it was Stephen Colbert. Today it’s Jimmy Kimmel. Tomorrow, it’s whoever disagrees with the prevailing winds. You don’t have to like Kimmel—or Fallon, or Stewart, or whoever comes next—to see the danger in that. A free society needs its provocateurs. It needs its loudmouths and contrarians. It needs people willing to say the unsayable, even if they’re obnoxious or wrong.

When we start clearing those voices off the stage, we create a vacuum. And history shows us that vacuums don’t stay empty for long. They get filled by power, by propaganda, by the loudest voices demanding conformity. We inch closer to a culture where disagreement feels dangerous, where everyone keeps their head down to stay out of trouble.

And that’s how democracies wither—not with a bang, but with a nervous shrug, as we decide it’s easier to cancel the jester than hear what he has to say.