‘His edges aren’t too sharp’: Jimmy Kimmel’s wild ride from Hollywood pariah to Oscars host
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For the first time in his life, Jimmy Kimmel was at a loss for words. It was 2017, and, on his watch, the Oscars were falling apart.
“Guys… this is very unfortunate what happened,” stuttered the stunned host as it became clear La La Land had erroneously been named Best Picture instead of actual winner, Moonlight. His face a blank space full of shock and fright, Kimmel turned to regard the Oscar statuette gleaming balefully in the hand of one of La La Land’s producers. “Why can’t we just give out a whole bunch of ’em?”
The La La Land/Moonlight incident scorched many reputations. The Academy of Motion Pictures. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the consultancy whose one job was to ensure the correct envelopes ended up in the hands of the correct people. Warren Beatty, a Hollywood icon humiliated before the whole world when handed an envelope with Emma Stone’s name as Best Actress rather than Moonlight’s as Best Film.
Kimmel was as speechless as any of them – almost as shocked as Chris Rock when Will Smith walked up and slapped him at the 2022 Oscars. Or as stunned as comedian Jo Koy when his gag about Taylor Swift landed dead on arrival at this year’s Golden Globes. And yet, as all around crashed and burned, the host clopped off into the sunset, good name undiminished. He returned as Oscars MC 2018: and now, in 2024, saddles up for his fourth Academy Award.
“I did not think I would ever do it again,” he told the LA Times recently. “I did two of them, and they went well — something crazy happened at one of them with a story I’ll have for the rest of my life. I know how much work goes into them, so I thought, ‘Yeah, I don’t necessarily want to do this ever again.’”
One reason he has come back is that movies have become fun again, he intimated to the LA Times. In 2023, he agreed to return, having enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick. This year, he goes into the Oscars with Margot Robbie’s Barbie fresh in his memory. The fact that there are big hits that he can riff on is a plus: he recalls delivering a zinger about Moonlight at the 2017 Oscars only for it to dawn on him that few in the room had seen it.
“I knew there [Top Gun] was a movie that people had seen, and it just makes the job easier,” he said. “Then this year, I am sitting in a movie theatre watching Barbie and thinking, ‘Well, maybe I’ll do this again, because at least I have a point of reference with everyone.’”
He is also open to criticism—a rarity at the higher echelons of American entertainment. “Last year, I said something about Irish people drinking,” he confided to the LA Times. “My dad is Irish, this is not something I imagined would come off as racist, but to certain people [including Liam Neeson], it did. I tried that joke out 40 different times with 40 different people, and no one ever raised that red flag.”
If Kimmel loves the Oscars, then the Oscars love him back. “It’s important to have a host who knows how to handle live television and a live audience,” said Academy chief executive Bill Kramer last year, explaining why the gig had gone to Kimmel, 56, whose day job is fronting Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC. “He’s funny, he’s respectful, his edges aren’t too sharp”.
Kramer’s key observation was that Kimmel’s edges “aren’t too sharp”. Kimmel, Las Vegas-raised son of an IBM executive, came up in the gonzo world of morning radio, where edges were as sharp as they came: he was sacked twice in his early radio career for being over the top and abrasive.
That was followed by a turn as a sidekick on the comedy quiz show Win Ben Stein’s Money. Ben Stein somehow led to Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2003, where the chaos continued. Early in his late-night career, Kimmel suggested his audience be plied with free alcohol to create a raucous atmosphere—a strategy that backfired on night one when a woman vomited loudly and at length.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! was parachuted into the slot previously occupied by Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect when Maher was fired for saying that the 9/11 bombers, while terrible people, were “not cowards”. An advertiser boycott resulted in ABC giving him the heave. The gap in the schedules was initially supposed to be plugged by a topical comedy hosted by future Daily Show star Jon Stewart: instead, ABC decided to return to the talk show format for the first time since the Dick Cavett Show in the Seventies.
Kimmel seized the opportunity with both hands. He pushed for his new vehicle to go out live (US talk shows typically record in advance). Yet, as with the free booze, this quickly misfired when, in 2004, Boogie Nights actor Thomas Jane said “f–k” on air. Neither the vomiting nor the f-bombing was the fault of Kimmel. But they were of a piece with the anarchic energy of his early years on late night when he would lay into his guests with performative brusqueness.
This went down well with the sort of people who stay up until 12.30 am watching TV. But it was less appreciated by the Hollywood establishment, which quietly blacklisted him for several years. They were feuds too – with Kanye West, who objected to being mocked in Kimmel’s sketches, and with the city of Detroit, where his show was yanked from the schedules after he joked about rioters burning it to the ground if they lost a big basketball game.
“I didn’t understand that you had to be nice to the guests,” Kimmel told Vulture. “I’d mow through them and then their publicists would never bring anyone back.”
Twenty-one years later, Kimmel counts Jennifer Aniston and George Clooney as friends and is now the establishment figure to which he used to set himself up in opposition. For instance, he once said he’d “kill myself” if forced “to interview c-list celebrities”. Then, a few years later, he suggested ABC incorporate advertisers’ products into his comedy routines. A comedian who hadn’t wanted to sell out was now a pitch-man for household brands.
“That was my stupid idea,” he admitted. “Then it turned into a big moneymaker for them. Now I’m stuck with it.”
Yet that pragmatism was combined with gonzo energy that set him apart from other US talk show hosts—most notably giggling celebrity tickler James Corden (who has since made the return journey across the Atlantic). For example, towards the conclusion of one particularly underwhelming episode, Kimmel declared, off the cuff, “My apologies to Matt Damon – we ran out of time.”
Damon wasn’t supposed to be on the show. Kimmel has said it simply to inject some life into a dreary 60 minutes of banter. Damon later took up the story: “He [Kimmel] came backstage, and I asked him what that was about. And he was like, ‘You want to know what happened?’ I was doing a particularly lame show; I think my guests were a ventriloquist and a guy in a monkey suit. We were wrapping it up, and there was a smattering of applause in the audience. I was having kind of a low moment, and I just said, ‘My apologies to Matt Damon; we ran out of time.’ My producer was right off-camera and he doubled over laughing. It was just gallows humour.”
Bug-eyed humour and a knack for creating headlines are part of Kimmel’s appeal. Plus, as Alan Partridge might say, he comes across as surprisingly down to earth. By the standards of talk show hosts – those two words again: James Corden – he doesn’t seem particularly smug. And he has stayed loyal to people who came up with him – his cousin, Sal, writes for the show, his brother Jonathan directs sketches, while another cousin, Micki, is his booker. He also commissioned a nude painting of his agent Jim Dixon, which now hangs in his office (Kimmel’s – not Dixon’s).
He may have survived the biggest Oscar debacle this side of The Slap. But there have been other missteps. Kimmel was, as the internet would say, “called out” last year when he took his pratfalling too far at the 2022 Emmys (he had previously hosted the first “pandemic Emmys” in 2020).
Jimmy Kimmel Live! had lost to John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight in the Outstanding Variety Series category. Kimmel responded by pretending to get drunk and pass out on stage. He was still lying there when his friend Will Arnett announced Abbot Elementary creator Quinta Brunson had won the gong for best comedy writing.
With Kimmel prone, Brunson was forced to step over him and make her speech. “Jimmy wake up, I won, “she said. Later, she complained he’d overshadowed her big moment. He brought her on his show to apologise.
Kimmel won’t pretend to be drunk at the Oscars (for which he has previously claimed he was paid “just” $15,000). In the wake of the La La La/Moonlight mix-up and the 2022 Will Smith “Slap”, he and everyone else involved will pray for an incident-free night. But if anyone does do a Will Smith and jump up with murder in their eyes, Kimmel says he’s prepared.
“If somebody comes up on the stage and slaps me?,” he said in response to a question from the Hollywood Reporter. “Well, I size them up, and, if I’m bigger than they are, I beat the s___ out of them on television. And if it’s the Rock, I run.”
ITV’s Oscar coverage starts at 10.30pm GMT. US viewers can watch on ABC from 4pm PT