Jimmy Kimmel has a bone to pick with Benjamin Franklin. On Monday night, the Jimmy Kimmel Live host made it abundantly clear that he is no fan of Daylight Saving Time. While Guillermo Rodriguez, Kimmel’s sidekick, was thrilled to get an extra hour of sleep, Kimmel admitted that he was not so lucky, “because I have a 4-year-old maniac living in my house.” Kimmel took a picture of the clock at the exact time his son came and asked for some French toast (it was 5:59 a.m.). Needless to say, he’s not a fan of the time change—and wanted to sway viewers to his way of thinking.
“And why? Why do we do this to ourselves? Daylight Saving Time is something Benjamin Franklin, who has been dead for 230 years, came up with as a joke—and it’s still screwing with us. It really was. For no reason. We don’t have to worry about conserving whale blubber for our lamps anymore.
Here in California, we voted to end this three years ago. We passed Proposition 7, which was supposed to give our local authorities the authority to end Daylight Saving. That was in 2018. It got 60 percent of the vote, and yet here we are in the dark again at 5 o’clock. I’m going around the house resetting all the clocks, looking at manuals—enough is enough! I got up before 6 o’clock this morning! Kids don’t know it’s Daylight Saving Time!”
Kimmel explained that the Secretary of Transportation is the person who’s in charge of Daylight Saving Time, which right now means it’s Pete Buttigieg. “Last time he was on our show, I asked him to end it,” Kimmel explained. “He said he’d see what he could do. You know what he did? He did nothing. He did nothing at all!” But Kimmel hasn’t lost all hope that he can do something about the clock change.
Now that Buttigieg has two-month-old twins, Kimmel is hopeful that “now maybe he’ll understand what a nightmare this is. Save us Penelope and Gus Buttigieg!”
In one last desperate attempt at hoping someone would listen, Kimmel shared that “even history’s worst man, Donald J. Trump, supports not supporting it… This is a bipartisan issue.” In order to help gain some momentum for his cause, Kimmel suggested that viewers get #GiveDaylightSavingTheButtigieg trending.
You can watch the full clip above.