Last week Aaron Rodgers did a dumb, weird thing: While on The Pat McAfee Show he randomly and baselessly suggested late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel would be on Jeffrey Epstein’s list of former clients (alongside the frontrunner for the GOP ticket, incidentally). Why would he do that? As with some of the quarterback’s other beliefs, it’s a mystery. Kimmel responded by threatening legal action. Both McAfee and ESPN apologized. Rodgers, so far, has not. The ball was thus in Kimmel’s court about what to do next. The answer, at least for now: roast the crap out of him on his show.
On his first show of 2024, Kimmel said it was “already a crazy year, particularly for me.” He relayed the strange story, while noting the troubling real world implications it’s created for him.
“When you hear a guy who won a Super Bowl and did all the State Farm commercials say something like this, a lot of people believe it,” Kimmel told the crowd. He compared what Rodgers said to what the QAnon crazies have claimed about him, namely that he’s one of the Hollywood types, like Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey, who drink the blood of children.
“I know this because I hear from these people often,” he said, “My wife hears from them. My kids hear from them. My poor mailman hears from these people. And now we’re hearing from lots more of them thanks to Aaron Rodgers.”
Kimmel then speculated that Rodgers “believes one of two things. He actually believes my name was going to be on Epstein’s list, which is insane. Or the more likely scenario was he doesn’t actually believe that, he just said it because he’s mad at me for making fun of his top knot and his lies about being vaccinated.” Kimmel then shared a clip of him mocking Rodgers last February about his theory that the spate of UFO sightings were a cover-up for the Epstein documents, which began to be unsealed last week.
He’s particularly upset, I think, because I made fun of the fact that he floated this wacko idea that the UFO sightings that were in the news in February were being reported to distract us from the Epstein list. That’s Aaron’s theory that he shared, and I mocked him.
Kimmel then summed up Rodgers pretty good:
I spent years doing sports. I’ve seen guys like him before. Aaron Rodgers has a very high opinion of himself because he had success on the football field, he believes himself to be an extraordinary being. He genuinely thinks that because God gave him the ability to throw a ball, he’s smarter than everyone else. The idea that his brain is just average is unfathomable to him. We learned during COVID that he somehow knows more about science than scientists. A guy who went to community college then got into Cal [University of California, Berkeley] on a football scholarship, and didn’t graduate, someone who never spent a minute studying the human body is an expert in the field of immunology. He put on a magic helmet and that G [the Green Bay Packers logo] made him a genius. Aaron got two As on his report card, they were both for the word ‘Aaron.’
Kimmel concluded that “this hamster-brained man” is suffering from something called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is defined as “cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.”
“In other words, Aaron Rodgers is too arrogant to know how ignorant he is,” he said. “They let him host Jeopardy! for two weeks, now he knows everything.”
Kimmel wrapped things up on a positive note, of sorts: “I also want to say congratulations to Aaron Rodgers, who has done the impossible: He made the New York Jets look even worse.”
You can watch Kimmel tear apart Rodgers in the tweet embedded above.