1. Introduction

James Patrick Anthony Dore (born July 26, 1965) is an American stand-up comedian and political commentator. He hosts The Jimmy Dore Show, a talk show on YouTube formerly affiliated with The Young Turks. Dore's material frequently criticizes the Democratic Party from a left-wing perspective.

2. Early Life

Dore was born in southwest Chicago , Illinois, on July 26, 1965, into a Catholic family of Polish and Irish descent. He was raised in a blue-collar neighborhood.^[1]

He has eleven siblings; Dore is the youngest of seven boys.^[2][3] Due to his large family, Dore grew accustomed to playing to an audience early in life.^[4] He used comedy to avoid beatings from his older brothers.^[3] Dore's father was a policeman and owned a brickwork business.^[2] Dore has described his father as a Reagan Democrat.^[5] During Dore's senior year in high school, he argued with his father against Ronald Reagan's presidency.^[6]

He went to Catholic school for twelve years which he felt was very strict.^[7] Dore attended Illinois State University, but dropped out after three years, and gained employment as a forklift driver.^[2] He later graduated from Columbia College Chicago^[8] with a degree in marketing communications.^[9] Dore started performing stand-up comedy in 1989 in Chicago,^[3][5] before he moved to Los Angeles in 1995.^[2]

3. Career

3.1. Comedy

Jimmy Dore started his comedy career in Chicago in 1989.^[3] Dore said it began after he watched many late-night talk shows and thought he could do better.^[3] The stand-up comedians that influenced Dore include George Carlin, Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Hicks.^[5]

Dore made appearances as a stand-up comic on late-night television shows such as ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live!, CBS's The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, and NBC's Late Friday. He was the lead performer in a Comedy Central Presents half-hour special on April 9, 2004, and Comedy Central's Citizen Jimmy, a one-hour stand-up special which was chosen "Best of 2008" by iTunes. He was a writer–performer for the off-Broadway show The Marijuana-Logues which ran at the Actor’s Playhouse in New York City.^[10]

Dore has performed at the Tropicana’s Comedy Stop,^[11] the Palm’s Playboy Comedy Club,^[12] Catch A Rising Star in Reno,^[13] and Harrah’s in the Las Vegas Strip.^[14] He has also performed at Just for Laughs in Montreal, the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the Amsterdam Comedy Festival, and for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.^[5] He had a role in the 2008 documentary film Super High Me.

In 2005, Dore's act started to incorporate video clips of politicians, journalists, TV personalities and entertainers.^[3] Dore said nobody else was doing this sort of act,^[3] which turned into a monthly show at a Los Angeles theatre.^[15] Dore moved away from a standard stand-up set to a 50-minute show which he would later take on tour.^[15] His comedy style was described in 2006 by The Central New Jersey Home News as incendiary and "based on what makes most in the States angry and uncomfortable."^[7] An article in the Chicago Tribune compared Dore's stand-up, where he "riffs off the faux pas and flubs of famous folks", to Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.^[3]

Dore hosted the podcast Comedy And Everything Else with his wife Stefane Zamorano and previously with Todd Glass, who departed from the show in late 2009.^[16] Comedians who were guests on the podcast included Jim Gaffigan, David Spade, Maria Bamford and Kyle Cease.^[16]

He also hosted his monthly show, Left, Right & Ridiculous, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Hollywood. Dore's first book, Your Country Is Just Not That Into You, was published in 2014. A comedy special, Sentenced to Live, was released on October 6, 2015.

3.2. The Jimmy Dore Show

In June 2009, he began producing The Jimmy Dore Show, a weekly one-hour comedic look at the news, which originates at KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles , airs nationally on the Pacifica Radio Network. It aired online on TYT Network from 2009 to 2019. Dore appeared as a frequent guest host on Current TV's political commentary show The Young Turks with Cenk Uygur. Dore continued working with Uygur on The Young Turks as it became an on-line network. In July 2017, Dore began hosting his own show on the network called "Aggressive Progressives."^[17]

A 2017 article in The Boston Globe said YouTube demonetization was not only impacting hate videos, but also controversial content ranging from left-wingers such as Dore to Trump supporters such as Diamond and Silk.^[18]

On April 13, 2019, during a livestream, Dore officially announced his departure from The Young Turks Network, citing a desire to focus on his own show and his live performances.^[19]

In a July 2020 video, Dore erroneously said Joe Biden had once "hosted a black face affair with a bunch of rich white people" before Dore showed an altered clip circulating on social media since January which had darkened the face of black singer Jerome Powell.^[20][21] One day after the video was uploaded it received over 100,000 views, and has since been removed from YouTube.^[20]

In January 2021, Dore interviewed Zackary Clark, a member of the anti-government, far-right extremist Boogaloo movement.^[22][23][24] Clark used the pseudonym "Magnus Panvidya".^[22] Dore tweeted that he was "completely floored" when Panvidya said he supported Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ rights and opposed racism, police brutality, war and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.^[23] In an opinion piece for The Daily Beast, Alexander Reid Ross described Dore's interview a "public-relations disaster".^[25] According to Ross, filmmaker Rod Webber told Dore in a subsequent interview that he should "vet [people like Panvidya] more before putting them out on the internet to tons of people, to let them just say what they want to say unchecked."^[25]

3.3. Discussion of Conspiracy Theories

In May 2017, Dore discussed conspiracy theories over the murder of Seth Rich on his show.^[26] According to Salon, Dore continued to insist that there were "a lot of red flags" and there "is probably something more to this story" after the source of much of the conspiracy theory was discredited.^[27] In December 2020, an article in New York magazine said Dore's discernment was questionable due in part to his "promotion of conspiracy theories implicating the DNC in Seth Rich's death".^[28]

In 2017, Dore argued that the Syrian government's chemical weapons attack on the opposition-held town of Khan Sheikhun was likely to have been a "false flag," orchestrated by groups opposed to Bashar al-Assad.^[29] The investigative journalism site Bellingcat reported that Dore received $2,500 from The Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees in 2017. The Association is responsible for the Serena Shim award and is described by Bellingcat as a pro-Assad lobby group.^[29] According to Bellingcat, Dore featured Eva Bartlett in "another 2017 conspiracy-theory segment" about Syria.^[29]

In 2018, according to Stephen Shalom writing in New Politics, Dore cited an op-ed which quoted US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis out of context as saying that he did not have evidence the nerve agent sarin was used in Syria.^[30] During a press conference in February 2018, Mattis was referring to recent reports when he said he did not have evidence of sarin use, and he also said Assad's government had "been caught using" sarin during the Obama administration and "they used it again during our administration".^[30]

4. Political Views

Dore said his stand-up shifted to be more political in 2005 and he described his new style as "'stickin' it to the man' kind of comedy."^[5] According to a 2019 article in the Chicago Tribune, Dore's material critiqued "Wall Street, the military industrial complex, Big Pharma, political operatives and mainstream media".^[2]

In a July 2008 interview, Dore said part of him wanted Barack Obama as president but "as a comedian, it would be much better if John McCain became president".^[5] Dore said "whenever a conservative is in office, it's great for comedy", citing a "boom in comedy" during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.^[5]

A Los Angeles Times article said The Jimmy Dore Show was a progressive program which had "affection for [Bernie] Sanders and disdain for establishment Democratic politics."^[31] Dore supported Bernie Sanders' campaign in the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries, being called "Sanders-obsessed" by The Washington Post .^[32] He was critical of Senator Elizabeth Warren for not defending Sanders in the primaries when Sanders was accused of being misogynistic.^[33]

In 2016, Dore said a Hillary Clinton presidency would be worse for progressives than a Donald Trump presidency, saying "don't freak out about a Donald Trump presidency! I think, in fact, my theory is that it's even better for progressives in the short-term, meaning in the two-year term, and in four years for sure."^[28][34]

A Washington Post article in January 2017 stated that since the presidential election, Dore had "lit into Democrats for blaming hackers for their loss, raised doubts about the credibility of intelligence agencies, and seen the heavy hand of war hawks hyping the Russia connection to destabilize Europe and the Middle East."^[35] Dore was a staunch critic of the Special Counsel investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.^[36] In September 2017, Dore said "if you don’t think we need a third party, you’re not paying attention."^[37]

In June 2020, an article in The New York Times described Dore as an "ardent critic" of Joe Biden.^[36]

In December 2020, Dore circulated a plan to make Nancy Pelosi's re-election as House Speaker conditional on Medicare for All receiving a floor vote. The plan was endorsed by Justin Jackson of the Los Angeles Chargers and political commentators Krystal Ball and Briahna Joy Gray.^[38] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized the proposal to use her leverage for scheduling a vote that was unlikely to pass.^[39] Dore told his viewers Ocasio-Cortez was "standing between you and health care" and, in response to her argument that progressive breakthroughs require years of organising, Dore said "I figured this out in two weeks, AOC! You liar. You coward. You gaslighter."^[28] Journalists David Sirota and Ryan Grim said that progressives should use their leverage for other purposes.^[40] Dore and his supporters responded that a vote on Medicare For All would inform the public of which elected officials opposed a reform that Americans "overwhelmingly" supported.^[41][42][43]

In a July 2021 interview on Fox Nation's Tucker Carlson Today, Dore said that the United States is an oligarchy dominated by two corporate parties that are unaccountable to the general population. He emphasised that Joe Biden and the Democratic Party use identity politics to placate their political base so as to avoid having to implement populist progressive policies like raising the minimum wage, forgiving student debt, or establishing single-payer healthcare.^[44]

5. Reception

In a May 2016 article by Nathan Rabin on Vulture.com, the episode of Dore's podcast Comedy and Everything Else with Kyle Cease, who ran a controversial $3,000 stand-up comedy boot camp course, was included as part of "an ongoing tribute to the greatest individual comedy-related podcast episodes of all time."^[45] Rabin said Dore was a well-respected veteran and stand-up purist who believed the art of stand-up comedy was rooted in suffering and it could not be taught in a classroom.^[45] Joe Berkowitz, in a 2010 review of the podcast on Vulture.com, described Dore's interview with Cease as an "attempt at gotcha journalism that couldn't be any clunkier" and Berkowitz wrote that he could not "see how someone could walk away from this episode wanting to hear more from Jimmy Dore."^[16]

In 2019, comedian Reginald D. Hunter said The Jimmy Dore Show had "a familiar soothing American impishness" and Dore made "caustically smart observations of the American political left."^[46] A 2019 article published in the Chicago Tribune described Dore as possessing a "potent political voice".^[2]

Alexander Reid Ross, in an opinion piece for Haaretz, described Dore as a "conspiracy theorist" and "Kremlin defender".^[47] Stephen Shalom, writing in New Politics, has called Dore "Islamophobic", "conspiracist" and an "apologist for Assad".^[30][48] Shalom said Green party candidate Howie Hawkins "made a serious error" when he shared a platform with Dore which led to the International Socialist Organization's New York City chapter rescinding its endorsement of Hawkins in the 2018 New York gubernatorial election.^[48]

In 2018, an article published in CNNMoney described Dore's show as "a far-left YouTube channel that peddles conspiracy theories, such as the idea that Syrian chemical weapons attacks are hoaxes".^[49] Dore responded by saying of his show that, "We actually debunk conspiracy theories like the one that says Assad gassed his own people".^[50]

6. Personal Life

Dore lived with his partner Stefane Zamorano in Pasedena from 1997 until 2020, when the couple purchased a compound in Studio City, Los Angeles.^[51] In a 2008 interview, Dore said he was an atheist.^[5]

In 2021, Ana Kasparian accused Dore of sexual harassment when they worked together at The Young Turks, alleging that Dore had made numerous sexually inappropriate comments to her, including while she was teaching a college course to a group of students. Dore said that Kasparian had dressed "unbelievably inappropriately for a newsroom" and that, after she had "bent over in front of [him]" and he saw her underwear, he had said "nice news skirt", which "humiliated her". Dore said he later gave Kasparian an apology note following the incident.

7. Discography

• It's Not Brain Surgery (Jimmy Dore, 2000)
• Really? (Jimmy Dore, 2008)
• Citizen Jimmy (Image Entertainment, 2008)
• Sentenced to Live (Comedy Dynamics, 2015)
• It's 2016 (2016)