Jimmy Kimmel Details Exactly What Happened the Day of His Suspension

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Jimmy Kimmel stopped by The Late Show on Tuesday night, where he described to host Stephen Colbert how he discovered ABC was suspending his own talk show.

Kimmel Opened Up About the 'Very Strange' Experience

Calling his one-week suspension an “emotional rollercoaster,” Kimmel explained for the first time the details of how the “very strange” experience came to be. “It was about 3:00 [in the afternoon]. We tape our show at 4:30. I’m in my office, typing away as I usually do. I get a phone call, it’s ABC. They say they want to talk to me. This is unusual,” Kimmel told Colbert. “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,” Kimmel continued. “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.” At this, Colbert’s audience booed. 

“That’s what I said. I started booing,” Kimmel laughed. “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.'”

Kimmel Thought 'I'm Never Coming Back'

When the meeting ended, Kimmel “thought that it’s over. I was like, I’m never coming back on the air.” The situation was made trickier due to the fact that the audience for that evening’s show had already been seated, and several of the guests had begun their segments. Musician Howard Jones had already pre-recorded his performance earlier in the afternoon. Meanwhile, chef Christian Petroni, “who was making meatballs and polenta that night,” had his segment unceremoniously axed. “He’d been cooking all day,” Kimmel lamented.

The comedian admitted that the situation left him “shaken,” joking that his suspension “was like a DUI in L.A., three days in jail where I couldn’t say anything. I just had to sit quiet and make a lot of phone calls and take a lot of phone calls. You were very kind to call me,” he told Colbert. “I did hear from literally everyone I have ever met.”

Kimmel Blasted the President

When Colbert asked him if he ever imagined that “the President of the United States would be celebrating your unemployment,” Kimmel responded: “I mean, that son of a b--ch. 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. 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.”