Jimmy Kimmel

On January 26, 2003, ABC crew handed out cans of beer to the audience to keep people from walking out of the taping halfway through the show. Jimmy Kimmel made his late-night TV debut hungover, with a plastic cup full of whiskey on the desk. Critics tore him apart without mercy the next morning.

Nobody gave him a chance.

It took real nerve to take on giants like David Letterman or Jay Leno with a disastrous format taped in an old theater on Hollywood Boulevard. But Kimmel came up through the grind of morning radio and was used to getting fired.

Cheap beer and obscene puppets

Before reaching national television, he spent a decade behind a microphone at local radio stations in Phoenix, Seattle, and Los Angeles. At the influential station KROQ, he earned the nickname Jimmy the Sports Guy, cracking sports jokes between alternative rock songs while learning to improvise against the clock. That frantic pace shaped his blunt style.

In 1997, he made his on-screen debut with Win Ben Stein’s Money on Comedy Central. He shared the set with a stuffy economist, and his job was to mock contestants with a brand of irreverence that was unusual for the time. Two years later, he co-created the show The Man Show with Adam Carolla, a collection of sexist jokes, beer mugs and women on trampolines that would be unthinkable on any network today.

That period taught him the ins and outs of independent production. Through his company Jackhole Productions, he gave birth to Crank Yankers in 2002, a wild project in which rag puppets recreated real prank phone calls that he recorded with his comedian friends. So when ABC came knocking, looking for a face to compete in the late-night slot, they found a guy who knew how to launch a show on a shoestring and had zero hang-ups.

The Joke About Matt Damon and Surviving in the Open

The launch of Jimmy Kimmel Live! came close to total disaster during its first season. Disney executives threatened to cancel the broadcasts every Friday, and Hollywood stars refused to sit on his couch. To fill the gaps in the lineup, the host turned to his own family, placing his uncle Frank as a security guard and the parking lot attendant, Guillermo Rodríguez, as an unwilling co-host.

One ordinary night in 2005, he closed the show by saying they had run out of time to interview Matt Damon, even though the actor wasn't even booked to be in the building. That off-the-cuff remark sparked a fake feud that turned into million-view sketches online. In 2008, the comedic music video I’m Fucking Matt Damon topped ten million views on YouTube at a time when the platform was just getting started, and won two Emmy Awards for creative arts.

And the joke lasted two decades.

Kimmel understood online media before his late-night rivals. While other networks stayed fixated on traditional Nielsen ratings, his team created bits designed to be chopped into four-minute videos that people shared on their phones when they woke up.

The Wrong Envelope Diplomacy

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences called on him in 2017 to host the 89th Academy Awards, a ceremony that seemed routine until Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty read the wrong title for Best Picture. When the La La Land team interrupted their acceptance speeches to clarify that the real winner was Moonlight, the host grabbed the microphone amid the general confusion and eased the tension with a joke about Steve Harvey's envelope.

Live chaos was his natural habitat.

That ratings-boosting skill earned him a return as host of 2018, 2023, and 2024. On the latest broadcast, he responded live from the stage to a furious tweet posted minutes earlier by Donald Trump, drawing laughs from the audience at the Dolby Theatre. In 2022, he signed a contract renewal with ABC that guaranteed he would continue hosting the show through 2026, with an estimated salary of 15 million dollars a year.

In the control room on Hollywood Boulevard, an audio feed runs on a seven-second delay, as required by Federal Communications Commission regulations, ready to cut any insult before it goes out over the air.