TikTokers Claim Episodes of 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' Got “Banned.” It’s A Lie to Sell Nasal Sticks.
Debunking disinformation about late-night TV from the weird, hellish world of TikTok
Did you hear the scandalous news that an episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live—or was it The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon?—got scrubbed from public view as part of a high-level Big Pharma cover-up? If so, it sounds like you’re stuck in the same particularly hellish corner of the TikTok algorithm that I have been.
I keep getting served long-winded advertisements from influencers alleging just that. Make no mistake: stories of censorship like this would and should be a huge deal… if they were true. Read on to see why they’re not.
The gist of the videos are all the same: TikToker claims that an episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live was “banned” because the host and guest Kumail Nanjiani publicly denounced sleep apnea machines—or, alternatively, because guest Jim Carrey exposed that talk show hosts are “hired by the government” to “make you docile” and hide information. From there, they reveal the product that powerful forces allegedly don’t want you to know about: BoomBoom nasal inhalers, a nasal decongestant stick that boasts natural ingredients.
Most of the videos were originally posted over a few days in May, and have maintained a strong enough reach to keep them alive in users’ feeds since then. Some influencers have also recorded multiple versions of the clips—sometimes under alternative accounts.
The videos induce head-scratching, if not madness, from the jump—and that may well be what they’re designed to do. Tons of TikTokers these days seem to throw in inaccurate details on purpose so that users leave comments correcting them, thus driving up the post’s engagement and giving it a boost in the almighty algorithm. I don’t know how intentional the disinformation is among these influencers (disin-fluencers?), but the inaccuracies are consistent among each creator. Then again, the entire script remains relatively consistent—sometimes right down to choice and placement of profanity.
Here’s a compilation of just some of these misleading rants. (NSFW language)
To say nothing of their medical and governmental conspiracy claims, let’s break down the basic facts these guys get wrong.
1. That’s not Jimmy Fallon.
Each of the videos play clips from the supposedly lost Fallon segments that they’ve somehow managed to procure. Most of these TikToks begin with an image of Jimmy Fallon for your reference—some accompanied by a September 2024 headline from The Independent about Fallon’s episode schedule being cut down to four nights a week. Then they cut to the clip. The man behind the desk? Jimmy Kimmel. (In at least one instance, the screenshot of the Independent article has been actively swapped out with a photo of Jimmy Kimmel—meaning they went out of their way to get the info wrong.) Which leads us to our next issue…
2. That’s not The Tonight Show.
Sure, it can be hard for folks who don’t watch late-night TV to keep track of which shows are which. After all, Late Night and Late Show are awfully similar titles. Late Night and Tonight both have ‘night’ in them. And hey, they’re all technically “late night” shows. But Jimmy Kimmel tried to make that easy for viewers when he launched in 2003, putting his name right in the title. The clips these TikToks are showing are not, in fact, from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. A rule of thumb: If Jimmy Kimmel is behind the desk, you’re watching Jimmy Kimmel Live. (Okay, that wasn’t true on one occasion.)
3. It’s not live TV.
Neither Jimmy Kimmel nor Jimmy Fallon can slip up irreversibly in front of a national audience. Their shows are not live; they’re live-to-tape. Their teams can edit out content before it gets to air. In fact, they regularly do—TBD how much of those edits extol the wonderful secrets of BoomBoom nasal sticks.
4. Those episodes were never “banned.”
There is zero evidence that Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks got these episodes “banned” from the internet. In fact, all evidence points to the contrary. Perhaps the fact that all of these TikTokers have managed to find video of the “removed” segments should be the biggest clue: This footage was never “banned,” “removed,” or scrubbed from the web in the first place.
The Kumail Nanjiani interview is from November 16, 2022. The Jim Carrey interview is from November 13, 2014.
Like all network late-night shows, full episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live are typically only available for a couple of months after their broadcast on Hulu and ABC’s website, if that. It’s also not uncommon for YouTube clips from these shows to be removed or made private when they’re over a year old. But in this case, both videos remain readily available on YouTube.
Nanjiani’s interview is still up, two years and counting. Anyone looking for the video that the sleep apnea elite (apnea-lite?) covered up need only search the words “sleep apnea”—they’re right there in the title.
Carrey’s interview has also been easily searchable for a full decade. (It’s also got 10 million views, likely due in no small part to the fact that Carrey’s whole shtick in the segment is sarcastically revealing an Illuminati-like cult. If ABC really had some kind of sinister cover-up afoot, this would arguably be the first video to get Men in Black-style neuralyzed from the internet’s brain.)
5. All the other mistakes that were probably intentional.
That ain’t Family Guy. It’s The Simpsons. And his name isn’t Steve Hardy; it’s Steve Harvey.
Snark aside, the real damning evidence here is the uncanny resemblance that each of these TikTokers’ supposed exposés have to each other. Moving past the similar scripts, they all share a more damning trait: They’re all pitching the same product. TikTokers who ask “Why is nobody talking about…” really undercut their message when they’ve got a vested interest in what they’re talking about.