MAY 16, 2011
Jimmy Kimmel has a unique status on my show. He’s been on more than thirty times—sometimes to be interviewed but mostly to just hang out. I would feel funny letting anyone else do this besides Jimmy. He’s been listening to the show for so long that he understands how we work. “I’ve heard Howard’s voice more than that of any human being, including my mother,” he once wrote in a piece for the Hollywood Reporter. He knows how to fit into our dynamic. He can just sit there and be a part of whatever we’re talking about, whether it’s current events or the latest exploits of Tan Mom and other members of the Stern Show Wack Pack. He’s okay with being quiet, allowing things to unfold, and then chiming in with whatever he thinks.
When he does interject, his timing is perfect. He’s always so funny. Give him three seconds and he can come up with a joke about anything. So many times he’ll say something and I’ll think, “I wish I’d thought of that.”
His career has been a lot like my own. He came up through broadcasting, not stand-up comedy. That’s one of the things we discuss in this interview—which is the closest thing to a long-form conversation I’ve ever done with him. We talk about his unconventional path to becoming a late-night host and how he fits into that world. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that ABC gave him his own late-night show. Not only is he funny, but there’s a generosity and sweetness about him that makes him a terrific host. We’ve developed a wonderful friendship over the years, and I feel very lucky to have him in my life.
I’ll give you one specific example of the kind of guy Jimmy Kimmel is. He’ll often send me an e-mail: “Show was so funny this week. Loved the bit about Ronnie the Limo Driver’s animal clinic.” Or, “When you got on the megaphone and did that impression of your father saying ‘halibut’—just unbelievably funny.” He has no idea what despair and doubt I feel all the time. Despite my years of therapy, I still haven’t mastered owning my own feelings about the show. I sneak on Twitter to check listener reactions. I hate that I do that. I truly do. It embarrasses me that after all these years I can still be so insecure—that I rely so much on the opinions of others. When Jimmy’s e-mails come in, they feel like a lifeline. Once I sent him an e-mail that said, “Sometimes I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels.” A few days later I got an embroidered pillow in the mail that read: NOT SPINNING WHEELS BUT SPINNING GOLD SINCE 1979. This is a guy who’s busy twenty-four seven, yet he took the time to find someplace that made custom pillows. It’s one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever received. I put it on a shelf in my room where I can see it every day. It helps. I love him.
Howard: Hey, Jimmy Kimmel is here. He’s only here till eight o’clock, but you know I like when Jimmy hangs out on the show. Bring him in. Skinny Jimmy. How much weight have you lost?
Jimmy: About twenty pounds.
Howard: What’s going on with you? You look good.
Jimmy: You know, moderation.
Howard: You’re kind of handsome.
Robin: You finally realized you’re in show business?
Howard: Do you sense you’re more handsome? Don’t you think you are more handsome?
Jimmy: I wouldn’t say that I think that. But I do now look back at pictures of myself, and I’d make fat jokes about myself, but I didn’t really think I was fat. Now I realize that, yes, I was. And I still am probably.
Howard: Tell people why you’re in town this week. You’re in town for something called the Upfronts. Explain what they are.
Jimmy: It’s a very confusing event that goes on in television every year. All the advertisers gather and then the networks tell the advertisers about the new shows that they have coming up. They’re very excited about the new shows. They show clips of them and everybody sits there enthralled. And then, theoretically, advertisers buy time on these shows. Then we cancel all of those shows in the next twelve months. Every one of them gets canceled.
Howard: I always thought it was weird because it’s the only business where an advertiser commits money to a TV show that they don’t even know how it’s going to do.
Jimmy: It’s not a gamble at all because if the TV show doesn’t deliver that minimum rating that they’ve been promised, then we give them commercials on other TV shows. We’re like the stupidest bookies in the world. If the Jets don’t cover, we’ll give you a few extra points until they do.
Howard: Is this a mandatory thing for you in your job, or do you just do it because you want to be in good graces with ABC?
Jimmy: There are certain areas of the network that are very supportive around me and one of them is the sales department. If it weren’t for their support, I don’t know if I’d still be on the air. I just feel like as a good guy I should go and do this for them because I know it means something to them. The worst-case scenario for them is their clients come out of that Upfront and they’re like, “Oh my God, that was terrible. That was boring.” This is my ninth year in a row doing it. The first year I just went on and made fun of everyone, and I said good-bye to the people that I was working for because I figured they’d be fired as a result of hiring me. And sure enough they got fired.
Howard: You’re the Johnny Carson, so to speak, of ABC. You are their one late-night guy.
Jimmy: Sadly, yes.
Howard: What’s amazing to me is you’re very versatile. You were a radio guy. You worked at KROQ in Los Angeles and other radio stations, and then you got a job doing The Man Show. You were never a stand-up comedian and somehow you have this ability to go up onstage and deliver stand-up comedy. I would imagine that that made you a wreck when you first had to do these live appearances like the Upfronts where you had to tell jokes.
Jimmy: The first year I look like I’m on a ship because I’m rocking back and forth. I mean, just clearly terrified. I think it happened to work for some reason. People were charmed by my ineptness.
Howard: You were learning in front of a huge audience.
Jimmy: Yeah, on television. I really learned to do stand-up on television. Because I started on a game show, Win Ben Stein’s Money. I was the host some of the game and the rest of the game Ben Stein was the host. And then on The Man Show, Adam [Carolla] and I did stand-up together—which is in a way harder but also easier in another way.✦
Howard: Because you have someone there to comfort you?
Jimmy: Exactly. Then I got to my show, and the first year and a half I sat behind the desk. I didn’t do a stand-up thing.
Howard: You evolved into that as you got more comfortable. You do that off a teleprompter?
Jimmy: Cue cards.
Howard: Have you ever done stand-up where you go to a club and actually have a memorized act?
Jimmy: Not really. I do charity events and stuff, but I can’t memorize. I can’t remember anything.
Howard: Me too. When you go to a charity event, you’ve got a cue card guy with you?
Jimmy: No, no, no.
Howard: What do you do?
Jimmy: I just stumble through the whole thing. I’ll bring a little index card. I figure if I do too well with these charity events, they’ll ask me to do more of them. So I go in, and I’m happy if I get like a five or a six. And then I go home.
Howard: I love all that late-night war stuff. Do you ever pinch yourself and say, “I can’t believe I’m part of this”?
Jimmy: It is one of the strangest things. It really is. I mean, one of the weirdest things is flipping through the channels at that time and flipping past yourself standing like they do in front of a background like they have.
Howard: When you first started Jimmy Kimmel Live!, you didn’t anticipate looking like them. You wore a T-shirt under your jacket.
Jimmy: I’d always have a single ball poking through my fly.
Howard: No, but you wanted to do it in a different sort of format.
Jimmy: Yeah, it’s always stupid to do something different. People don’t want to see different.
Howard: That’s true. Even Merv Griffin—I go back to his day—he always came out, he did a little song, he did something to bond with the audience one-on-one. Jack Paar did it.
Jimmy: It’s like the law. You have to do a monologue. People tune out after the monologue for the most part. You lose a lot of people when the monologue’s over.
Howard: So you tried to do it without a monologue. You did it behind a desk.
Jimmy: Yeah, I did more like what Regis does. That type of thing, where I come out and BS. The first show I did I had no plan. I had a couple of taped bits that I was going to roll, but they were like twenty seconds long. I went out and really just kind of talked about what had happened. And I remember afterward we thought, “That went really well. That was really great.” I recently looked back on one of our first shows. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. If some other guy was starting a late-night show and I saw that, I’d be like, “Ugh boy. Man, tough night for Jimmy. That’s not going to work.”
Howard: The only thing I remember about your first show is that the plan was to allow the audience to drink and to have a bar. And ABC did away with that in two seconds because people were vomiting, right?
Jimmy: That’s never happened since but somebody did vomit during the first show.
Howard: Well, it hasn’t happened since because you stopped. They said it’s a liability, right? If someone legally drank themselves into a coma, ABC might be liable.
Jimmy: That’s what I was hoping for. To bring the network down.
Howard: The drinking stopped, but the guests are allowed to drink.
Jimmy: The guests are allowed to drink, yeah.
Howard: You have a whole bar set up back there. I’ve been backstage at your show, and it is packed with celebrities.
Jimmy: Only when you’re there.
Howard: Who decides who can get into that bar? What is the process? If I’m a guy who appeared on a sitcom and I was only on for, like, three weeks—
Jimmy: If you’ve been on our show, in general, you’d be welcome to come back.
Howard: Can someone become loser-ish if they show up too often? It would be a big deal maybe if I showed up to the bar one time. But if I started showing up every week, then you guys would start to really think I was odd, right?
Jimmy: Well, yeah, because there have to be better things to do than that. And people forget: we’re trying to work.
Howard: Talk to me about when Charlie Sheen kissed you on the lips. I’m a friend of yours, and I watched that show. I was skeeved out of my mind. And I knew you didn’t know that was coming. Because, listen, Charlie Sheen has a reputation for eating out tons of fucking hookers and all this kind of shit. When a guy like that kisses you, do you worry?
Jimmy: No. I will eat gum off the floor. That sort of thing doesn’t bother me.
Howard: Oh my God. My immediate thought would be, “Oh shit, I’m going to have a fucking problem with my lips.”
Jimmy: Not me.
Robin: Howard would have to go to the hospital.
Howard: Yeah, I would have to be boraxed. They’d have to take borax and wash down my lips. Were you taken aback when he did that? Or did you say, “Hey, great showbiz moment. This is good for my show.”
Jimmy: Well, both probably. I mean, it was kind of surprising the way it happened.
Howard: Were you incredibly frustrated that he wouldn’t sit there and be interviewed? Because he was hot as a pistol at that point. Everyone was talking about him. There he was on your show. He was handing out T-shirts. He wanted to announce his tour or something. But he sort of had it set up that he was just going to drop in and then leave.
Jimmy: He came in in another guest’s segment—in Mark Cuban’s segment.
Howard: Charlie Sheen walks in. So you know it’s gold. But he won’t answer any questions. Does that tick you off?
Jimmy: Not really because I didn’t think I would get any answers out of him anyway. He’s too smart, he’s too fast, he’s saying nonsense. Really, I didn’t care. It was enough to have him walk on and do that thing.
Howard: You let him go with the moment. How does that work when a guy like Charlie Sheen drops by? Who makes the decision to let him in in the first place?
Jimmy: That was Mark Cuban. The guest had him come and do that.
Howard: Do you see a ratings spike as soon as you get a Charlie Sheen?
Jimmy: It doesn’t really work like that, where we can analyze it like that. But it was all over the news the next day.
Howard: Has there ever been a guest that has driven up the ratings to an incredible amount? I know that Hugh Grant did that for Jay Leno back in the day.
Jimmy: When you’re on, we always get a noticeably good number. But there aren’t too many people. You’d be surprised at who the people are that actually have a noticeable increase. The Kardashians, for instance, get big ratings. People want to see what’s going on with them.
Howard: Even though they see the reality show, they want to see them. They can’t get enough.
Jimmy: They can’t get enough of them. They have to have every bit of them.
Howard: Conan O’Brien. Is his show getting any ratings?
Jimmy: They do well in their target audience, I think. It’s hard for me to say because I’m so absorbed in that world. I do hear things and kind of follow what everybody’s doing.
Howard: When’s the last time Letterman had you on?
Jimmy: I was on last year when I was here.
Howard: Were you kept in a dressing room like everyone else? Or because you are a fellow late-night talk show host were you brought into Dave’s inner sanctum?
Jimmy: I did say hello to all of them after the show.
Howard: After the show? Did you request that or Letterman asked that you stop by?
Jimmy: Letterman asked that I stop by.
Howard: Wow, I’ve never been asked that. I have never been asked to stop by afterward. You’re telling me the last time you were on they got word to you? They said, “Hey, hang out. Dave needs to see you after the show.”
Jimmy: Well, he didn’t need to see me. He just wanted to say hello. Our executive producer Jill Leiderman, she used to work at his show, and she was there with me. She was saying hello to him also.
Howard: Now you’ve been summoned.
Jimmy: Yes.
Howard: You would have rather have left, I’m sure.
Jimmy: No, no, no.
Howard: You were happy to be there?
Jimmy: I was delighted. Growing up, you and David Letterman—that was it for me.
Howard: Did he go, “Jimmy, hello.” Like you’re meeting Nixon.
Jimmy: [laughs] More or less.
Howard: It was a very stiff conversation?
Jimmy: I wouldn’t say it was stiff. It was funny. We talked, I don’t know, maybe it was a minute long or something like that.
Howard: During the whole [Leno-Conan] controversy, weren’t you upset that Letterman invited Leno to do a TV commercial during the Super Bowl?
Jimmy: Yes, I was very upset.
Howard: Thank you. That is bullshit!
Jimmy: I talked to him about it on his show also. I said, “He was drowning and you saved him.”
Howard: He saved him. Why?
Jimmy: I have a theory about it.
Howard: Go ahead. Excellent. I love theories.
Jimmy: All right. My theory is that there’s Dave and Jay. And they’re the guys. They compete.
Jimmy: And Jay wins, obviously. Jay wins the ratings. But everybody thinks Dave is better.
Howard: Right.
Jimmy: And Dave is better. They don’t need me and Conan and Jimmy Fallon and Craig Ferguson. They don’t need us. There’s Batman and Superman. They don’t need Aquaman and these other assholes running around. And I think by consolidating that, the focus once again went directly on [Dave and Jay] instead of on Jay and Conan. And I think ultimately he probably just thought, “This is really funny. I should do this.”
Howard: I think you’re right. I think he thought it was funny. But you have a good point. I never considered that. Maybe in a weird way, he was sick and tired of everyone being mentioned with Jay, and this put the focus back on him.
Jimmy: “Jay’s my archenemy.”
Howard: Right. He’s not Aquaman’s enemy.
Jimmy: That’s right.
Howard: “He’s mine. He might be an asshole but he’s my asshole.”
Jimmy: “He’s my asshole.” That’s just my theory on it.