Jimmy Kimmel was mildly impressed but definitely not amused by Nikki Haley on Thursday night, after the longshot GOP presidential candidate lifted one of his signature jokes.
“How would you like it if I launched a disastrous campaign for president?” Kimmel joked during his monologue. Ouch.
“You know, my day got off to a weird start,” Kimmel said. “This morning, I woke up, I had a text asking if we had Nikki Haley on the show the night before.”
“It actually said, ‘Did you have Haley on the show?’ It took me a while to figure out what ‘Haley’ meant. Haley who? Duff? Haley … Joel Osment? I didn’t know,” he explained. “So, I went online and learned that Nikki Haley — who is running for … her life right now — co-opted one of our bits.”
“She tweeted, ‘There are always going to be haters and doubters, but that means we’re doing something right. The best way to troll the trolls? Have a good laugh.’
And then she went right into ‘Mean Tweets,’” Kimmel said, elaborating that Haley used the formula, title, logo and graphic his show uses for the recurring bit.
“She called it ‘Nikki Haley Live,’” he continued, “and worst of all, she added the fakest fake laugh track I’ve ever heard.” At that, Kimmel rolled a clip of Haley where, yes, it pretty much was an exact copy of his bit.
“She’s a natural… The woman knows her way around a joke, you have to give her that,” Kimmel conceded. “But I, I don’t want to. This is not how it works. You can’t just take our thing and do it yourself. How would you like it if I launched a disastrous campaign for president?”
“This is why you lost Nevada to ‘none of the above.’ This kind of thing,” Kimmel continued, addressing Haley directly and referring to the fact she came in second in this week’s Nevada GOP primary despite running essentially unopposed.
“If you’re gonna steal our bits, at least eat all of Eric Trump’s Halloween candy and see what kind of tantrum he throws,” Kimmel joked. “Anyway, I wish you a lot of luck Gov. Haley, and you’ll be hearing from my attorney, one Rudolph Giuliani.”
You can watch the whole monologue at the top of the page now.
