Last year, Jimmy Kimmel suspended his eponymous show’s annual Halloween candy prank, where parents told their kids they’d eaten all their collected treats and then recorded their precious babies’ anguish to provide Jimmy Kimmel Live with free content. Kids, Kimmel rightly noted, had had a rough year as it was, and deserved to enjoy their candy without a side of psychological torment at the hands of their legal guardians.
Of course, because parents had also had a rough year, plenty of them did it anyway, likely in retribution for all those interrupted Zooms. And of course, because this year really hasn’t dialled down the roughness levels that much, the exact same thing has happened again in 2021.
“We didn’t ask parents to do this, but they just went ahead and did it anyway,” shrugged Kimmel on Monday night. “In fact, I think we got 200 videos.”
Kimmel rationalised the decision to show a handful of those videos “since the kids got pranked anyway.”
The children of the pandemic are made of tougher stuff than those who came before, though, and rather than dissolving into tears, made sure to hit back with the appropriate level of savagery. “Mom, you’re a dick!” howled a tiny Captain America.
“I thought you were on a diet?” asked another, wide-eyed with shock. (When told it was Jimmy Kimmel’s idea, he asks “Is he a bad guy?” You tell us, Spider-Man.)
And the third, shaking a tiny fist in retribution at his gluttonous father: “He gonna get dia-we-a!”
Let this fury be a warning to Kimmel that this should be the last year he encourages this mean bit, even retroactively. As a parent himself, he should know better than to keep rewarding bad behaviour with attention.
