How is Richard Nixon’s downfall connected to Hitler and Lucky Charms to explain why Elon Musk started supporting President Donald Trump?
Well, Jimmy Kimmel headed down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories to find out.
The Rabbit Hole, a six-part online series fronted by the comedian, was recently nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Short Form Comedy, Drama Or Variety Series category. It’s a category full of late-night as Kimmel is competing against Seth Meyers’ Corrections, The Tonight Show: During Commercial Break and Foxsplains, a similarly conspiracy minded series hosted by The Daily Show’s Desi Lydic.
Wearing a hoodie and talking into a tiny microphone, Kimmel is doing “the research that the mainstream media won’t” in search of laughs and Emmy gold.
In addition to exploring Elon Musk, Kimmel also asks the important questions such as Is Trump A Time Traveler? in the series, alongside explaining why there are so many fights at Waffle Houses, but not iHope, spotlights the dangers of windmills, explains how the government is systematically polluting recreational waterways with the “chemtrails of the sea”, and exposes the truth about 5G.
The series was the brainchild of Jimmy Kimmel Live! writer and producer Jesse Joyce.
“I have a [conspiracy] brain but what separates me from the kooks is that I was hugged enough as a kid. I can make those same absurd connections to things that aren’t necessarily connected. Basically what every conspiracy theory does is it just assigns tremendous meaning to this random, small thing. That is exactly like a comedy impulse,” he tells Deadline.
He says that he’s always pitched these jokes to Kimmel, but the show’s monologue can’t really afford the amount of time needed to unpack them.
Molly McNearney, executive producer and head writer of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, says, “We’re really excited by the idea of doing something online only because it allows a guy like Jesse to write something that’s six minutes long that can live exactly as it should, with all of those details. Our monologue is super tight and we have so much to pack in, particularly living in another Trump administration, so there’s no room for it so we were really grateful when we figured out we could let Jesse do these to live online.”
“Jesse’s been living in this world for a while. He is a meticulous researcher, and everything he writes for the show is very lengthy, because the details are very important to him, and this obsession over details really paid off. Unfortunately, maybe he is too familiar with this world,” she adds.
For instance, Joyce read the transcript of all of the Nixon tapes looking for a small penis reference to tie to Elon Musk.
“I don’t know who this crazy, ranting lunatic is, but he represents me in no way. He’s not a [member of my staff], and I don’t know what my wife is doing,” jokes Kimmel.
Conspiracy theories have become exponentially more commonplace over the last ten years with the rise of Q’Anon and the Pizzagate conspiracy about a ring of child-eating pedophiles that emerged during the 2016 Presidential election.
But before all of this, conspiracy theories, on the whole, used to be fun and rather lighthearted such as people searching for Bigfoot or UFOs.
“I pitched that very thing on the show. The premise was Bigfoot was trying to speak to conspiracy people. He was like ‘What happened to you guys, we used to try and find UFOs together and now it’s all turned into baby eating. A couple of years ago, we went to the flat earth convention to screw with them but now they’re all sort of connected into just this one giant conspiracy that you have to agree that the earth is flat if you think that Donald Trump is secretly John F. Kennedy,” Joyce adds
The Rabbit Hole series has been watched more than 1.3M times on YouTube with the episode about Trump being a time traveler from London clearly the most popular, and surprisingly, waffles and pancakes not being a deep enough conspiracy.
McNearney says the digital numbers are “wild”. “We have 20 million subscribers to our YouTube channel, and we put on a monologue every night, and then we wake up and 5 million people have seen it on YouTube. It’s a totally different time. I think that this bit did really well because disinformation is coming from the internet, that’s the nucleus. That’s where everyone’s getting their crazy theories and information, so to parody that in the very world in which they all live was kind of beautiful.”
