Jimmy Kimmel recently went on The Late Show and got up close and personal about his suspension from Jimmy Kimmel Live .
The whole conversation happened on Stephen Colbert’s show, and saw the host admit to riding an “emotional roller coaster” that felt “very strange” at the time.”
“It was about 3 p.m.. We tape our show at 4:30. I’m in my office, typing away as I usually do,” he started by recalling. Just then “I get a phone call, it’s ABC. They say they want to talk to me. This is unusual.”
“As far as I knew, they didn’t even know I was doing a show previous to this, so I have like five people who work in my office with me so the only private place to go is the bathroom. So I go into the bathroom,” he added.
“And I’m on the phone with the ABC executives and they say, ‘Listen, we wanna take the temperature down. We’re concerned about what you’re gonna say tonight and we decided that the best route is to take the show off the air tonight.’ I said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ and they said, ‘Well, we think it’s a good idea.’ And then there was a vote and I lost the vote.”
“So I put my pants back on and I walked out to my office and I called in some of the executive producers, and there were about nine people in there, and I said, ‘They’re pulling the show off the air.’ I thought, ‘That it, it’s over.’ I was like, ‘I’m never coming back on the air',” he recalled.
At the time the audience was already sat in their seats he added, “ready for the show.”
But what was worse was what followed because the moment he left the El Capitan Theatre, “I’m followed by 20 paparazzi cars, TMZ people jumping in front of me on the way home.”
“We’re just trying to get to the house and we’re like, ‘Should we be going to our house?’ There are two helicopters following us home. I hadn’t had makeup on yet, so my bald spot was not painted in. This is something I did not want America to see.”
He also compared the suspension to being akin to “a DUI in L.A., three days in jail where I couldn’t say anything” at one point and added, “I just had to sit quiet and make a lot of phone calls and take a lot of phone calls… I did hear from literally everyone I have ever met.”
Near the end Colbert even asked Kimmel whether he ever thought a day like this would happen where “the President of the United States would be celebrating your unemployment?”
“I mean, that son of a b****. No, I never imagined that we’d ever have a president like this, and I hope we don’t ever have another president like this again,” Kimmel admitted. "I never even imagined there would ever be a situation in which the president of our country was celebrating hundreds of Americans losing their jobs. But somebody who took pleasure in that—that to me is the absolute opposite of what a leader of this country is supposed to be.”