On Monday's Jimmy Kimmel Live, a bunch of celebrities flipped the mean-tweet script and read unkind comments about Kimmel to celebrate his 50th birthday — one of several surprises for Kimmel on the show. "My mother was mad about it after the show — she was like, 'Why would those people say these things about you?'" Kimmel said on Tuesday's Kimmel Live. "She wanted to know where they lived — she's Italian." But one of his 140-character roasters, Larry David, "really enjoyed it," Kimmel said, so much so that the mean tweet he read on Monday's show "was one of the few tweets he read that we could use, because he couldn't stop laughing through the whole thing. Every mean tweet he read about me had him cracking up, so I asked to see them," he said, and he thought you also might want to watch "Larry David unable to curb his enthusiasm about a lack of enthusiasm for me."
The Kimmel mean-tweet segments are a kind of ritualistic public self-flagellation, and so it felt kind of odd to see other people flagellating Kimmel. Showing the David outtakes essentially let Kimmel own his public humiliation, in the traditional mean-tweets spirit. "I don't know how to take that," Kimmel said gamely, "but I'm happy, because I didn't think Larry was capable of that kind of joy in his life."
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