Jimmy Kimmel Has Been Making Pointed BTS Jokes And ARMYs Aren't Here For It
He's compared the band to Covid twice recently.
BTS fans are outraged by Jimmy Kimmel’s latest jokes. The Jimmy Kimmel Live! host has gotten in plenty of hot water with ARMYs because of his frankly xenophobic material over the past week. The comedian has recently compared the K-pop band to COVID not once, but twice on his show. Since the two occasions, Twitter users have rallied around BTS and expressed their outrage. These tweets criticizing Jimmy Kimmel’s BTS COVID jokes all say the same thing.
The first instance Kimmel made a BTS joke was during an interview with Emily in Paris star Ashley Park on Jan. 20. The actor told a story about freaking out over BTS sharing love for her performance of their song “Dynamite,” only to then realize she had contracted the Omicron variant in the midst of her excitement. “You thought it was BTS fever. They’re both very dangerous. You’re lucky to come out both of those alive,” Kimmel said to Park, who is a fan of BTS. Only a week later, on Jan. 27, Kimmel referred to a boy band being “so contagious it destroys all life on earth” in a monologue about the new variants of COVID. Although he didn’t mention the band’s name, it was clearly another BTS joke.
“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. “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,” continued the comedian. “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.”
Since the two episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live! have aired, the BTS ARMY has expressed how angry they are, and #JimmyKimmelRacist began trending on the social media platform.
“The audacity to say that about an Asian artist in front of an Asian woman. @jimmykimmel really compared BTS to COVID in the year 2022 and amidst all the anti-Asian hate,” one Twitter user wrote.
The fact that the host made the same comparison twice in a matter of days makes it more outrageous to a lot of ARMYs:
Everything about it was wrong:
It’s seriously the worst move:
Some people are saying it’s time for Kimmel to retire:
He needs to stop:
ARMYs are clearly not happy, and for good reason. Kimmel has yet to address the online backlash.
