Matt Walsh Demands Jimmy Kimmel Be 'Frog-Walked To Jail' Over Very Obvious Joke

Jail for Jimmy Kimmel for one thousand years!

A bevy of right-wing lunatics are losing their minds over a very obvious joke that Jimmy Kimmel told during his monologue on his show on Wednesday night. Why? Because they claim the joke is “just like” the idiocy that got right-wing influencer Doug Mackey, AKA Ricky Vaughn, sentenced to seven months in prison and fined $15,000 for election interference.

Except for how it’s not!

Mackey, as you may recall, created and posted what looked like an ad for Hillary Clinton, telling voters they could vote by text.

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He also specifically targeted Black voters, which was just adorable of him.

Anyway, Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel, a well-known person known to tell jokes for a living (as opposed to an internet rando) opened up his late night comedy show with a joke telling everyone to vote early or vote on time, followed up by a joke suggesting that those who are voting for Trump should “vote late.”

Now, it’s clear to those of us who get jokes and understand what is and is not a joke (you can usually tell by the fact that it is funny!) that Kimmel’s joke was a joke — whereas that was not the case with Mackey’s. For one, he’s not a famous comedian, or even anyone who is known very much outside right-wing social media. For another, it wasn’t funny and it was not obviously a joke to anyone who saw it. No one in their right mind or even out of it would think Kimmel was serious, whereas several people did think Mackey was.

But Matt Walsh had words! And thoughts! Not necessarily coherent ones!

Transcript via Media Matters:

Look, I know we all get a little exhausted by the constant complaints of double standards. Right? On the Right, we're always whining about double standards, and it does get exhausting after a while. But also, it — we have to complain about it because the other option is to just accept the double standards and say nothing about them, which is not an agreeable option either. So, that's why I have to say, in this case, a guy named Douglass Mackey was put on trial by the Biden administration, and they're trying to send him to prison for exactly the kind of joke that Kimmel just told. Douglass MacKay, as we've talked about on the show many times — if you listen to the show, you're familiar with the case — he posted a meme, encouraging Hillary supporters to vote by text, and apparently, some of them were dumb enough to actually do it. And — but it was a joke because, of course, you can't vote by text. I'm sure we'll get to the point pretty soon where you can, but right now you can't. And Kimmel's telling exactly the same joke. The punchline is exactly the same, which is that, oh, I'm advising you to vote in a way that you can't really vote. If you try to vote that way, then your vote won't count. It's the same joke.

No, because Mackey’s wasn’t a joke. There was no punchline. It was meant to trick people, whereas it was very, very obvious that Kimmel was joking. At least to anyone who knows how jokes work, where there is a setup and a punchline and then people laugh afterwards.

Which is why I am honestly not joking when I say that if Trump is elected, he should have Jimmy Kimmel arrested for that. He should have him arrested. He should open up a federal investigation and have this guy arrested, have him frog-marched from his studio into a jail cell. You gotta make these scumbags live according to their own rules. It's the only way. So, that's the only way that I stop complaining about the double standard is if we force one standard. If we say to them, like, this is the standard you're setting for us, and now we're gonna force you to live by it too.

That’s a weird fantasy.

Now, you might say that Jimmy Kimmel's joke is free speech. And it is. It totally is. It was free speech for Douglass Mackey too. But are we gonna continue protecting the free speech rights of people who are actively trying to imprison us for exercising our own free speech rights? I mean, that's just suicide.

The only funny thing here is that Matt Walsh thinks that anyone thinks Republicans are for free speech when they are the ones going around banning books across America. They think that free speech is “No one can criticize me or make me feel bad for using racial slurs,” which is not a thing.

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It was not free speech for Doug Mackey because his looked realistic and was specifically designed to trick people. It said on the bottom “Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.” It was not immediately discernible as a joke and there were, as Walsh did note, people who thought it was real.

I’m sorry, but it’s not our fault that Republicans don’t know how jokes work. The only people they have to blame for not being funny is themselves.

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