(SeaPRwire) –   Comedian Jimmy Kimmel opened his late-night show Monday by quipping, “You know how sometimes you wake up and the First Lady has issued a statement demanding you be fired from your job. We’ve all been there, right?”

Kimmel, a frequent critic of President Donald Trump and his family whose program was briefly suspended last year following Administration pressure on ABC, responded to First Lady Melania Trump’s demand earlier that day for the network to dismiss him over a joke from the previous week.

In an April 23 sketch parodying the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Kimmel pretended to speak to Melania, joking that the First Lady possessed “a glow like an expectant widow.”

However, after the real dinner on April 25 was interrupted by a shooting—believed to be a third attempt on the President’s life—Melania asserted on social media that Kimmel’s “hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country” and that “his monologue about my family isn’t comedy.” The President also weighed in, citing the “expectant widow” comment as “far beyond the pale.”

Defending himself on Monday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel stated his comment was not an incitement to violence but was “obviously a joke about their age difference and the look of joy we see on her face every time they’re together.”

He elaborated: “It was a very lighthearted joke about him being nearly 80 and her being younger than I am. By no definition was it a call for assassination, and they know that.”

He added sarcastically that if the Trumps genuinely thought his words could provoke violence, they should also examine a pre-dinner remark from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who told Fox News, “It will be funny. It will be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight.”

While Kimmel expressed understanding that the event was especially “stressful” for the Trumps and concurred with rejecting “hateful and violent rhetoric,” he contended the First Lady should first advise her husband to tone down his own inflammatory remarks against critics and the media.

“Donald Trump can say whatever he wants, as can you and I, as can all of us, because under the First Amendment, we Americans have a right to free speech,” Kimmel said, also noting his vocal opposition to gun violence. “I am sorry that you and the President and everyone in that room on Saturday endured that. I truly am,” he stated. “Just because no one was killed doesn’t mean it wasn’t traumatic and frightening, and we ought to unite and be our best.”