Molly McNearney's 2017 teetered uncertainly between annus mirabilis and annus horribilis. The co-head writer of Jimmy Kimmel Live! since 2008, she saw her program celebrated as a comedic bulwark against A.C.A.-repeal madness, and she played a major role in shaping Kimmel's material for the Academy Awards. On top of that, McNearney gave birth to her and Kimmel's second child, a boy named Billy, in April. (The two have been married since 2013 and also have a three-year-old daughter, Jane.) But Billy's arrival came with a scare: he was born with a congenital heart defect that has required two open-heart surgeries to date. While Billy is bearing up well, McNearney and Kimmel's new resolve in taking on political issues, from gun control to the inequities in this country's health-care system, has ruffled some feathers. Most notably, Alabama's rootin'-tootin' Roy Moore challenged Kimmel to come to his state to settle their differences "man-to-man." Herewith—as McNearney juggles her day job, motherhood, her preparations for a second consecutive Kimmel-hosted Oscars telecast, her impending 40th birthday (March 13), and the daily challenge of being funny in the face of too much crazy—are some facts and insights gleaned from an afternoon visit to her workplace.

SHE GREW up in the St. Louis suburb of Chesterfield, Missouri, in a loving family that was, she says, "middle-class sometimes dipping into working-class."

SHE CHARACTERIZES her upbringing as "Irish Catholic conservative," with a dog named Shamrock and the belief, imparted to her by her parents, Mike and Mickey, "that Republicans want to give power to people and Democrats want to give power to government."

SHE SAVED up her allowance as a child to buy her father a gaudy necktie from Rush Limbaugh's "No Boundaries" collection.

SHE ADMIRED Diane Sawyer as a girl, making homemade videos in which, in character as Sawyer, she reported on local goings-on in Chesterfield.

SHE BEGAN to formulate her own political beliefs shortly after her graduation from the University of Kansas, when she moved to Chicago and "started meeting people who weren't like me."

SHE UPPED sticks and set out for Los Angeles not knowing a soul besides her then boyfriend, with whom she had been in a longdistance relationship. The boyfriend didn't pan out, but L.A. did; soon after their breakup, in 2003, she found a job as an assistant to Jimmy Kimmel Live! s executive producer.

SHE HAD never seen the program, nor heard of Kimmel.

SHE WAS a work colleague of Kimmel's long before they were a couple, and prefers to maintain certain boundaries on the set. "There will be tunes when he will naturally put his arm around me, and I always swat it away—it's become a joke," she says.

SHE IS the inventor of the show's popular "Celebrities Read Mean Tweets" segment, right down to its use of R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts." "The song reminds me of high school, and feeling sorry for myself," she says.

SHE NORMALLY receives Kimmel's opening monologue at around four P.M. for a look-over. But, on Kimmel's first night back on the air after Billy's birth, he didn't send it to McNearney, telling her, "I think you just need to hear it when I say it for the first tune."

SHE WATCHED her husband's impassioned monologue from home while breast-feeding Billy, and burst into tears. "It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen," she said, "so vulnerable and raw. He had zero to gain from that, and many things to lose."

SHE AND Kimmel both remain observant Catholics, attending Mass with some regularity.

SHE HAD her daughter, Jane, baptized in the Church. However, the very day of the baptism, she hand-wrote Jane a letter, to be read at a later date, in which McNearney explains "why I baptized her and what I know sucks about the Church," e.g., that it "doesn't allow women to be priests, or homosexuals to get married."

SHE IS pained that her father voted for Donald Trump, but pleased that he has come to regret his vote.

SHE LEARNED of his regret when Mike, who had impulsively moved to Puerto Rico from St. Louis to run a bicycle-rental business, lost contact with his family for several days after Hurricane Maria's landfall. He finally resurfaced after waiting several hours to buy a single gallon of gas for $60, just so that he could charge his phone in his car and send Molly an e-mail that read, "Trump is an ass."

SHE RECKONS that, at the rate that Hollywood power players are being exposed as sexual predators, the Dolby Theatre audience to whom Kimmel will be performing on March 4 will be "a roomful of women, plus some really nice guys like Tom Hanks."