US comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show has been yanked off air ‘indefinitely’ after a couple of barbed – but frankly bog-standard – lines about the politics swirling around Charlie Kirk’s killing.

The Disney-owned network ABC has offered little in the way of a proper explanation. From where I’m sitting, the decision reeks of pressure from political powers above.

It looks and feels like punishment. And it makes a mockery of the right’s endless sermon about ‘unlimited’ free speech.

From Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace’s jaw-dropping, baseless lie that Democrats were to blame – made before a suspect had even been apprehended – to Vice President JD Vance insisting left-wing violence is the bigger problem, the hypocrisy is staggering.

Kimmel poked at Donald Trump’s curiously performative public grief with a line that would barely raise an eyebrow in US TV’s long history of late-night satire: ‘This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.’

It was a sharp, accurate summary of a bizarre moment when a reporter asked the President how he was holding up after Kirk’s death, and he started talking about his shiny new White House ballroom.

Kimmel also said: ‘The MAGA gang [is] desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.’

Sure, it’s crude and pointed, but it’s not gleeful. Yet within hours, Nexstar Media – one of the biggest owners of TV stations in the US – announced it would not air the show on its syndicated local stations ‘for the foreseeable future’.

More affiliates followed. Then ABC stuck a label on it and called it an ‘indefinite’ hiatus.

State pressure was hardly subtle. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr publicly urged affiliates to pull the show, threatening sanctions, while the President cheered from the sidelines and called it ‘great news for America’.

You do not need to be a civil-liberties lawyer to feel the chill. So what happened to that absolutist free speech the right loved so much?

For years we were told that offence is the price of a free society, that comedy must be fearless, that ‘cancel culture’ was the gravest threat.

Charlie Kirk himself said last year: ‘Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.’

However you look at it, Kimmel’s monologue did not even approach that threshold.

He did not celebrate a death or revel in a family’s pain. He mocked political hypocrisy in the long-established house style of American late-night television.

Even those hostile to the comedian have struggled to produce anything more damning than the goldfish line. This was nowhere near the edgy meme culture that has been circulating since the shooting, and miles away from the genuinely offensive, explicit taunts you can find elsewhere online.

Defenders of the decision say this isn’t censorship – just ABC calming an angry audience and protecting the bottom line. Give me a break.

When the country’s largest station group dumps a show after a powerful regulator’s public threat, there’s no way I believe they’re speaking freely. They are reacting to the threat of political retribution.

Aside from the embarrassing capitulation of America’s institutions conceding to political pressure, Jimmy Kimmel Live! is not a partisan show that only swings at Republicans. It has taken lumps out of Democrats plenty of times.

Last year, guest host Lamorne Morris mocked Joe Biden when he dropped out of the race, quipping that he had ‘wandered off’. Kimmel himself roasted Democrats’ clunky ‘choose your fighter’ social video this spring, calling it embarrassing for ‘everyone involved’.

Kimmel rolled his eyes at Biden’s stagecraft and compared Kamala Harris verifying Trump’s win to ‘making your ex DJ at your wedding’.

This punctures the idea that ABC’s move is partisan play. What has changed is not Kimmel’s tone – it is the climate around him.

Since Kirk’s killing, senior Republicans have raced to assign ideological blame while railing against ‘left-wing extremism’, despite Kirk’s killer being raised by Republican parents and his possible motives are not yet known.

There is a taste argument here, and it deserves good faith. A public figure has been killed. Emotions are raw. Many will find any jokes in the vicinity distasteful.

Personally, I have not taken part in any of it. For me, the whole thing has been a sorry chapter in the sad story of a country unable to face up to its addiction to guns.

But the bar for pulling a national programme off air – with a vengeful regulator hovering – should be higher than taste.

If you celebrated the ‘free speech’ era when it meant tolerating ugly jokes about liberals, demonising trans people, or mocking Biden’s health, you do not get to rewrite the rules now a joke lands on you.

Kimmel’s critics could’ve written sharper rebuttals or switched channels. Instead, the precise people who have spent years screaming about unlimited free speech have proved that free speech was never the point.

One mild, standard-issue joke about their politics and ABC’s longest-running late-night talk show is pulled off air overnight – ‘cancelled’, if you will. (Oh, the irony.)

For a political tribe that revels in labelling opponents ‘snowflakes’, it is somewhat reassuring to know we can finally agree on one thing: Words can hurt, after all.