TV Tattler: Celebrity Interviews

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Nov. 15 -- Jimmy Kimmel acknowledges that plenty of his fans think he lost a bit of his swagger when he started his late-night show, 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' The guy they knew made women jump up and down on a trampoline for that nonstop bachelor party 'The Man Show.'

The Kimmel who appears at midnight on ABC gets laughs with fake snake bites and fat suits, and according to the host, is much closer to his real personality than anything he's done on TV (including his stints on 'Win Ben Stein's Money' and Fox Sports). And 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' is the only late show that has actually had a notable bump in the ratings this year. ABC has also drafted him to host this year's 'American Music Awards,' airing Tue., Nov. 21 at 8PM on ABC.

After plenty of doubt early on, it appears that the lovable late-night host might finally be coming into his own. While driving to work, Kimmel spoke on the phone to AOL Comedy editor Neil Gladstone.

To what do you attribute the recent ratings success of 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!'?
I guess it's easy to go up when you're starting with almost nothing. It's like when a 500-pound man loses 50 pounds. He's still fat but he's making progress.

Before you started 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' you said there were a lot of late-night rules you wanted to blow up. Are there roadblocks you've pushed through and other ones you couldn't overcome?
I think I was very foolish when I started and thought, "I'm gonna do things totally differently from everyone else." What you figure out is that it's almost like baseball. And in baseball every so often there's a pitcher who throws sidearm or a 5-foot-3-inch second baseman, but there are some fundamentals that they still have to obey. People want to see a monologue when the show starts. There's a format that was established a long time ago and anything different from that makes people uncomfortable. So you just have to be as different as possible from within that established format.

Have you done anything that pushed the boundaries that you realized you should never do again?
Oh yeah, a million things. We got rip-roaring drunk on the air the first week just as kind of a "F-you" to the network. They were clamping down on us and I thought, "Oh yeah?" I honestly had no idea how much it would upset them. I thought they were going to think it was funny. That's my main flaw: I always think authority figures or my boss is going to think something I do is funny. And usually they don't.

You've been pretty public about your problems with narcolepsy. Have you ever fallen asleep on the set of 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!'?
No, but I did fall asleep on the set of 'Win Ben Stein's Money' a couple of times.

What's the most embarrassing thing your girlfriend Sarah Silverman has said about you onstage?
Well, she says a lot of embarrassing things. Mostly they're not about me; they're just "My boyfriend 'fill in the blank' jokes." Some of them existed before I even knew her, and yet they get pinned on me. She's got one in which she says her boyfriend's balls smell like her nana's house. Every time she does it people look over at me and point at my balls. And I'm like, "Listen, my balls don't smell like your nana's house. Don't get me started here." She thinks everyone understands that it has nothing to do with me.

Does she clear things like that with you before she puts it in the act?
No. What she does is say them, and then I get mad and yell at her and she does it again.

How do you feel about segments from your show being sent around as viral videos?
I think it's pretty cool. I think there's definitely a downside to it. In the '70s and '80s if you wanted to see something happening on television, if Johnny Carson had a big guest, you had to be sitting in front of that television. There was no YouTube. There was no Tivo. There was no VCR. And that added an element of excitement to a show. Whereas now, you can be pretty comfortable that if something crazy happens you're going to get to see it on your computer the next morning. On the other hand, it's cool that people who might never see the show get a taste of it from the Internet.

Your show is filmed out of a Masonic Temple. Have you learned anything about the masons as a result of that?
It is a Masonic temple, but it hasn't been active for a little while. I do know a bit about the Masons, but I didn't learn it from filming in the temple.

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