Setting: The stage of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”. The desk is gone. Three ornate, high-backed papal-style thrones are arranged in a semi-circle facing a single, simple wooden chair. The lighting is dramatic, chiaroscuro.
Characters:
- Pope Pius XIII (Lenny Belardo): Dressed in immaculate white papal vestments, sipping a Cherry Zero.
- Madonna: Dressed in a fusion of a 1990s Jean-Paul Gaultier cone bra and a severe, modern black pantsuit. She looks furious.
- Jimmy Kimmel: Sitting in the wooden chair, sweating under the lights, clutching a bottle of water.
(The scene opens. There is no audience applause. Just silence.)
Pope Lenny: Jimmy. Thank you for coming. We would have summoned you to the Vatican, but the espresso is better here. And the irony is… thicker.
Jimmy Kimmel: (Nervously) Your Holiness. Madonna. It’s an… honor? I think? My producers said this was a pre-tape for a… interfaith charity special?
Madonna: (Her voice a low, cold whip) Shut up, Jimmy. Just stop talking.
Kimmel: (Flustered) Okay. Not a charity special. Got it.
Pope Lenny: Jimmy, we have been watching your program. Not the monologues, they are banal. Not the sketches, they are infantile. We watch the segment you call… “Mean Tweets.”
Kimmel: Oh! Well, that’s… it’s all in good fun! It’s harmless! The celebrities are in on the joke!
Madonna: I am not in on the joke. I have a scroll, Jimmy. A scroll of vellum, specially commissioned, containing just a fraction of the most vicious, hateful, creatively bankrupt tweets directed at me. It stretches from the Chateau Marmont to the Pacific Ocean. And it is all. Your. Fault.
Kimmel: My fault? How is it my fault? I just read them out loud! I’m highlighting the absurdity of the trolls!
Pope Lenny: Are you? Or are you sanctifying them? You take this digital bile, this pure, anonymous hatred, and you give it a stage. You set it to music. You hand a Grammy-winning musician a card with the words “Your music sounds like a dying seagull fighting a dial-up modem” and you present it as entertainment.
Kimmel: It’s a laugh! The audience laughs!
Madonna: The audience is laughing at me, you myopic man-child! You have created a culture where the most base and cowardly form of criticism is not just validated, but rewarded with a moment on national television. You’ve made bullying a game show prize. I should have you fired. I should have you disappeared to a Kabbalah retreat in Idaho.
Pope Lenny: She is right, Jimmy. You have taken sin—the sin of bearing false witness, the sin of cruelty—and you have monetized it. You have built a small, glittering altar to hatred and you sacrifice the dignity of your guests upon it weekly for ratings. It is… very American. But it is not Catholic.
Kimmel: (Sweating profusely) With all due respect, Your Holiness, Stephen Colbert makes political jokes that are way more divisive! People are always trying to get him fired!
Madonna: Stephen Colbert attacks power! He attacks politicians! He uses wit, and intelligence, and fact! You, you hand a megaphone to every basement-dwelling gremlin with a WiFi connection and a pathological hatred of women who age! It is not the same! He should be given a medal! You should be fired and replaced by a hologram of a more talented Jimmy! Fallon!
Pope Lenny: (Takes a long sip of his Cherry Zero) The Material Girl, though often heretical, speaks a truth tonight. Colbert’s sin is pride, in his own intellect. A venial sin. Your sin, Jimmy, is the exploitation of despair for a cheap laugh. You are a middleman for misery. A distributor of spiritual poison. This is a mortal sin.
Kimmel: So… what? What do you want me to do? Cancel the segment?
Pope Lenny: (Stares with icy blue emptiness) We want you to think. We want you to consider the weight of the platform you treat so lightly. Or perhaps, we will simply pray for you. And as you know, Jimmy… our prayers are… very effective. And often… terrifying.
Madonna: I’m not praying. I’m suing. And then I’m having my people talk to ABC. This ends tonight. The only mean tweet should be about your failing ratings. Ciao, Jimmy.
(Madonna stands. Pope Lenny remains seated, not blinking, staring at Kimmel. The lights on the stage blow out one by one with a loud POP, until only the spotlight on Kimmel’s terrified face remains. Then, it too goes black.)
The air in the executive dining room, usually crisp with the scent of money and power, was now thick with a tension so palpable Jimmy felt he could chew it. Sumner Redstone, a figure who seemed less a man and more a monument carved from ambition and old leather, hadn’t just dropped a bomb; he was casually polishing it in his napkin.
Jimmy Kimmel’s mind, usually a rapid-fire generator of jokes and comebacks, was a blank, blue screen. The laughter that had echoed seconds before now felt like a ghost haunting the room. He replayed the words, searching for the punchline, the hidden camera, the something.
“I’m… I’m sorry, Mr. Redstone,” Jimmy stammered, a nervous laugh escaping him that sounded more like a hiccup. “A mitzvah? Did you just say you’re firing me for my own good?”
Redstone’s eyes, pale and sharp behind his thick glasses, didn’t waver. He took a slow, deliberate sip of ice water, the clink of the glass against his teeth echoing in the silence. “A good deed, Jimmy. Yes. You are a very talented boy. Very funny. But you are wasting it.”
“Wasting it?” Jimmy’s professional persona was crumbling, revealing the stunned young comic beneath. “The ratings are through the roof. We just won the time slot. The affiliates are happy—”
“Affiliates!” Redstone spat the word like a piece of gristle. “Sheep. They see green pastures and they graze. They don’t see the wolf in the tall grass.” He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial rasp that smelled faintly of expensive Scotch and entitlement. “You are the wolf, Jimmy. But you have dull teeth. You play nice. You make fun of the politicians, the movie stars… it’s safe. It’s boring.”
Melissa, the VP, had turned a shade of pale usually reserved for marble statues. She opened her mouth to interject, to perform her expensive crisis-management function, but a microscopic shake of Redstone’s head froze her in place. She was a spectator now, just like everyone else.
“Boring?” Jimmy’s shock began to curdle into a hot, defensive anger. “With all due respect, sir, the show is a critical and commercial success. We’re doing groundbreaking comedy.”
“Groundbreaking?” Redstone let out a dry, rattling sound that was his version of a laugh. “You are scratching the surface with a plastic spoon. I am offering you a diamond-tipped drill.” He gestured vaguely around the opulent room, at the building itself, at the vast empire it represented. “This… all of this… was not built by being ‘successful.’ It was built by being ruthless. By seeing a weakness and exploiting it. By not just winning the game, but by setting the board on fire and charging your enemies to watch it burn.”
He fixed Jimmy with that unnerving gaze. “You have a weakness, Jimmy. You need to be liked. It is a cancer for a true king. A mitzvah is to cut out the cancer before it kills the host.”
Jimmy sat back, utterly bewildered. He was being fired not for failure, but for a perceived lack of megalomania. It was the most backhanded compliment in corporate history.
“So… let me get this straight,” Jimmy said, finding a sliver of his comedic footing through sheer absurdity. “Your good deed, your act of Jewish charity, is to fire me from a hit show to… toughen me up? To make me more like you?”
“A man does not build an empire telling dick jokes to teenagers,” Redstone stated, as if it were a fundamental law of physics. “He builds it by taking what he wants and destroying what he doesn’t. You are coasting. I am pushing you out of the nest. You will fly, or you will splat on the pavement. Either way, you will no longer be mediocre. The mediocrity is what I am saving you from. That is the mitzvah.”
He signaled to a waiter, who immediately scurried over with the check. Redstone didn’t even look at it, simply scrawled his signature—a gesture that could move billions—and handed it back. The meeting was over.
“I have given you a gift, Jimmy,” Redstone said, rising slowly with the help of his aide. “The gift of desperation. The gift of nothing to lose. It is the most fertile ground for greatness. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a board call. The adults have to go make some real money.”
He shuffled out, leaving Jimmy and the petrified VP in his wake. The silence he left behind was louder than any applause.
Melissa finally found her voice. “Jimmy, I… I don’t even know what to say. We can… we’ll fight this. The contract…”
Jimmy wasn’t listening. He was staring at the empty doorway, the old man’s words echoing in his head. The gift of nothing to lose.
A slow, incredulous smile spread across his face. It was the most insane, arrogant, and utterly terrifying thing he had ever heard. And a dark, rebellious part of him wondered if the ruthless old bastard, in his own twisted, tyrannical way, might have been right.
