What would it be like to live in a world where late night comedians were able to refrain from making demeaning jokes about BTS — especially when those same comedians benefit from having BTS on their shows?
Late night host Jimmy Kimmel followed up a recent interview with Emily in Paris star Ashley Park where he compared “BTS fever” to having COVID-19, with a new monologue featuring a sly reference to a boy band “so contagious it destroys the earth.” While he doesn’t directly name BTS, the subtext was loud. After all, who is the biggest band in the world right now?
“These variants, all the different variants in the world right now, it reminds me of the boy bands in the late 90s and early 2000s,” Kimmel said in the monologue. “You had the big ones like Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, and then that mutated into O-Town and 98 Degrees. The JoBros popped up, Big Time Rush, they kept splitting off in different directions, eventually One Direction. And they took pieces and it popped up all over the world until eventually we get to one that’s so contagious it destroys all life on earth.”
To make that kind of “joke” so close to the deserved criticism he and the show have received for making a high-key careless, low-key xenophobic remark about BTS and COVID seems… ill-advised and sloppy at best, pointed at worst. But even more than provoking the ire of fans who are justifiably tired of having their favorite group constantly mocked, it’s just plainly ignorant of the world we live in. The world where anti-Asian hate crimes rose during a global pandemic; the world where Asian actors and celebrities are underrepresented in Western media; the world where Asian musicians have to work seven times as hard to succeed, only to have the goalposts moved at every turn.
Whatever Kimmel intended, it’s simply time to find some new material.
Teen Vogue has reached out to Jimmy Kimmel for comment.
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