Jimmy Kimmel is an affable enough guy: charismatic, funny, relatively upbeat. Yet he's getting death threats from an surprising crowd: gamers.
The row he's caused is over what most people would consider a relatively tame sketch on his late night TV show, "Jimmy Kimmel Live!", during an episode that aired on August 27.
Kimmel framed his jokes around the announcement of YouTube Gaming, a service from YouTube that enables game streaming through the mega-popular online video service. It's basically YouTube's answer to Amazon-owned Twitch, which also offers live game streaming.
Here, have a watch yourself and see if you catch what's offensive enough to warrant death threats in the sketch, which the show uploaded to YouTube on August 28:
Ok, that was a trick: There are no statements that justify death threats, no matter who says them.
The threats directed at Kimmel are especially unwarranted. Although clearly directed at the tens of millions of folks who enjoy playing games, his jabs are infantile and slightly ignorant at the absolute worst. They're more about poking fun at himself over his own ignorance than at the people he claims to misunderstand.
The big-picture joke in his initial segment is a goof about "where does it end?" Put another way: If people are enjoying the act of watching another person play a video game, what about watching a person watch another person play a video game? And so on and so forth.
There are some more meaningful jabs in there if you're really looking for them — "To me, watching another person play video games is like going to a restaurant and having someone eat your food for you." — but nothing hateful or cold.
For better or for worse, the sketch incited the rage of some of the internet's angriest game-watching fans. Like this commenter:
And this one...
And this one...
No joke!
Those images are all pulled from a second video, posted to YouTube on September 1. Despite being heavily "downvoted" — the web equivalent of saying you don't like something — it's got just shy of one million views.
I think it's pretty funny! Watch it here:
The hate only increased after this clip with many, many more death threats in the video's comments section.
Kimmel — smartly knowing that continuing to poke the hornet's nest will only elicit more YouTube views — filmed a third segment on his show September 1, then uploaded the clip to YouTube on September 2.
In the video, Kimmel breaks down the entire saga thus far with characteristic concision:
Video gamers are mad at me because last week I made comments about YouTube Gaming, which is a new platform on YouTube where people who play video games can watch other people playing video games. I suggested that watching other people play video games is a double waste of time. And it turns out I was wrong – turns out it's a great way to spend time. So we posted this video of me saying this to YouTube and we got a lot of angry comments. I read a bunch of them last night. So then we posted that video to YouTube and got a lot more angry comments today.
The video is another romp through the most ridiculous and offensive comments his videos have received. Many of them are once again threats of physical violence or death.
Kimmel is not only gaming the angry gamers by posting a video about a video about watching video games — he's also doing great traffic for his YouTube videos.
Just take a look at the "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" YouTube page and compare the clips of his recent gaming sketches with that of his other clips. Most fetch on the order of 10,000-100,000 views. His first response piece, however, is nearing one million views at the time we posted this story:
Which explains why Kimmel doesn't exactly look hurt while he reads from the comments section.
Instead, he looks like this:
Angry internet mob, you've just been trolled.
