By Dan McLaughlin
Sunday, March 29, 2026
Rich and the rest of The Editors podcast crew had a good, well-deserved
kick at Jimmy Kimmel for mocking Markwayne Mullin on the grounds that Mullin
used to run a plumbing business and didn’t graduate college. I don’t have
anything to add to their defense of plumbers, but let me just pile on with one
further thought: Who is Jimmy Kimmel to be any sort of intellectual
snob? Leave aside the fact that Kimmel himself didn’t finish college and has only an honorary degree awarded
after he became famous on television. Kimmel’s an entertainer. He
works in the most prominent field (other than sports) in America in which an
educational credential of any kind is unnecessary. Sure, a comedian who does
highbrow material (i.e., not Kimmel’s material) can get something out of
being well-educated, but plenty of comics make it just on being funny people
with very little education. (In fact, lots of comedians are precisely the sorts
of can’t-sit-still types who are ill-suited to the classroom.) And Kimmel
doesn’t even write his own jokes. Back when he was doing comedy that didn’t
depend on a late-night writing staff, he was known for The Man Show,
which was not exactly Masterpiece Theater.
Kimmel regularly welcomes to his show actors and
musicians who never had much schooling, or if they did, put little or none of
it to use in their careers. Bruce Springsteen, who is more sophisticated as a
lyricist than your median rock star, used to introduce his piano player Roy
Bittan as “the Professor” because he was the only guy in the band with a high
school diploma. Bob Dylan, who literally won a Nobel Prize for Literature for
his lyrics, is a college dropout. And those guys are practically brain surgeons
and rocket scientists compared to a lot of others in their field. (Not that
Kimmel has gone easier on Trump appointees such as Ben Carson, an actual brain
surgeon, or Elon Musk, an actual rocket scientist).
Elitism isn’t always a bad thing. There are jobs
in the government, such as Supreme Court justices or the Surgeon General, in
which we want people with elite training and skills. But even when some
stringency in job requirements is warranted, I fail to see what Jimmy Kimmel,
of all people, has done in his life to be condescending to anybody. Smugness is
not a credential, much less an accomplishment.
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