Jimmy Kimmel: Emmys ‘opened with Rita Wilson rapping and got even whiter from there’

Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel broke down the 2021 Emmys on Monday night. “What a show,” he said of the three-hour affair hosted by Cedric the Entertainer, which celebrated diversity yet awarded all acting prizes during the telecast to white performers. “They opened with Rita Wilson rapping, and somehow it got even whiter from there,” said Kimmel.

“Last year the Canadians came in and won it all,” he continued, referring to Schitt’s Creek’s sweep of the 2020 comedy awards, “this year it was the English. It was a Brits-krieg this year,” as half of the Emmys went “non – dare I even say un-Americans. Even Ted Lasso had to move to London to win an Emmy this year.”

Even more telling, he added, was a “dopey American” interviewer in London who asked Gillian Anderson, who won the Emmy for best supporting actress in a drama for playing Margaret Thatcher on The Crown, if she talked to the former prime minister about the role. Anderson answered, politely, that she had not. “The reason that she hasn’t is because Margaret Thatcher died in 2013,” Kimmel said. “But it would have made a great episode of The X Files if she had spoken to her somehow.”

Related: Trevor Noah on Nicki Minaj’s vaccine tweet: ‘This has turned into a real problem’

In other news, farm stores have not started to restrict sales of the livestock dewormer ivermectin, used by some hardcore anti-vaxxers as a Covid treatment despite debunking from health experts, to confirmed horse owners. “For those who cannot get their hands on the horse-y sauce,” Kimmel explained, “the anti-vaxx crowd has been turning to monoclonal antibody treatment,” an IV-hookup used to reduce symptoms of Covid.

“Pretty incredible people who don’t trust vaccines do trust being pumped full of lab-created antibodies,” said Kimmel. “This is like sky-diving and instead of using the parachute you’re given, you’re like ‘yeah, I’ll just crash near a hospital.’”

Trevor Noah

“We all recognized the heroic sacrifices that healthcare workers were making during the pandemic,” said Trevor Noah on the Daily Show. “And then, at some point, we all stopped clapping.

“But nurses never stopped sacrificing,” he added, “and right now things are as bad as ever,” as hospitals across the country are overwhelmed by unvaccinated patients (97% of hospitalizations and nearly all the deaths), and frustration with a preventable crisis hits a boiling point.

“I don’t blame these healthcare workers one bit for feeling fed up,” said Noah. “They’re being forced to deal with a completely preventable crisis. That’s not what they signed up for! They signed up to treat people for things that we don’t have vaccines for, and to pretend not to judge you when you got weird things stuck up your butt.

“Think about how frustrating this has got to be: this pandemic could be under control by now, and it should be under control,” he added. “But now, they have to fight it all over again.”

If you’re an “asshole” who doesn’t care for nurses, Noah added, “well guess what: when there aren’t enough nurses to go around, and the ones who are there are burnt out, well you might be the one who ends up paying the price.” Burnout has led to staff shortages at numerous hospitals, and increased risks of mistakes from staff burning the candle at both ends for months.

“This should be obvious, but nurses are the last people you want making mistakes on the job,” Noah said. “If someone working at Taco Bell is burnt out and distracted, the worst thing that happens is you walk out of there with a tortilla wrapped in cheese instead of cheese wrapped in a tortilla. But the mistakes that nurses can make are much more serious, and this is something that should scare even the anti-vaxxers out there.”

Seth Meyers

And on Late Night, Seth Meyers dug into more unhinged Covid conspiracies propagated by Fox News. “One way you can tell that the Republican party is intellectually bankrupt is that they spend very little time talking about policy and a lot more time talking about batshit conspiracy theories they concocted out of nowhere,” he said.

There’s ivermectin, and Fox News’s sudden hailing of rapper Nicki Minaj for tweeting she didn’t get vaccinated after claiming that her cousin’s friend in Trinidad developed swollen testicles after getting the vaccine. (Numerous health officials, including the health minister of Trinidad and Tobago, have debunked swollen testicles as a side-effect.)

“Great when the same people who scream ‘fake news’ treat a Nicki Minaj tweet about her cousin’s friend’s balls like it’s unimpeachable information,” said Meyers. “She just tweeted a rumor she heard that obviously wasn’t true; it’s not like she was reporting live outside a hospital on CNN.

“This is what the right is talking about instead of actual policy, and that’s because Biden’s Covid policies are fairly popular with a majority of Americans,” Meyers continued, pointing to polls indicating majority support for Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal employees and large businesses.

Nevertheless, conservative lawmakers have attacked the health measures in sensationalist terms; the North Carolina representative Madison Cawthorn called it “medical apartheid” on the alt-right channel Newsmax. “Yes, everyone knows you have a constitutional right to unrestricted air travel,” Meyers joked. “Who could forget Paul Revere’s famous words: one if by land, two if by sea, three if by Southwest with a six-hour layover at Chicago-Midway.”