Nearly 26 years to the day since he first attempted to tell the story of his climbing of Mount Everest before slipping, repeatedly, into a collection of thimbles, Jay Johnston is going to jail. Though this classic Mr. Show sketch still boils the blood with the thought of a thimble destroyer like Johnston going free for over twenty years, the actor will only pay a psychic price for the thimbles. No, per The Hill, Johnston, best known as the voice of Bob’s Burgers’ Jimmy Pesto, was sentenced to a year in prison for his connection with the January 6th storming of the capitol.
Johnston’s downfall began on March 4th, when the FBI tweeted a picture of someone who looked like one of the cops from Arrested Development who “outsourced” a baby from Julia Louis-Dreyfus. With Johnston identified only as Photo 247, it became an open secret within the comedy community who 247 was: The tall guy from The Sarah Silverman Program who’s not Steve Agee or Brian Posehn. By year’s end, Johnson was fired from Bob’s Burgers and well on his way toward being arrested and pleading guilty for participating in an insurrection to overthrow the U.S. government so Donald Trump could stay president. It almost doesn’t seem worth it when it’s laid out like that.
Previously, Johnston asked the court for leniency, arguing that Hollywood had blackballed him from the business, forcing him to make ends meet as a handyman and to admit that his participation in the riot was “a humiliation and a horrible oversight.” The judge presumably wanted Johnston to return to his story about tripping on a stool into a shelf of thimbles because he wasn’t buying it. Prosecutors argued successfully that Johnson “spread disinformation about January 6th” and showed a “lack of remorse” for participating in the riot, pointing to a photo of Johnston dressed as the Qaanon Shaman for Halloween 2022. Well, you know what they say,” once was funny, twice was just not being careful.”
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