“Tonight is my last new show for the summer,” Jimmy Kimmel declared from his home studio on Friday.
After 3,130 shows and nearly 18 years, the host of Jimmy Kimmel Live! told his audience that nothing was wrong, he is healthy, he just wants time with his family, and that “a cavalcade of very kind and capable people will be filling in” for him.
With that cue, a masked and bathrobed Matt Damon emerged from Kimmel’s bedroom, claiming that he’d been in there for months, waiting for a moment to appear on air. Schtick involving a hardbound copy of Tori Spelling’s sTORI telling and cuckoldry ensued.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! will be in repeats for two weeks before the train of guest hosts, and it remains to be seen just how that will work considering the current “from home” pandemic production of late night shows.
Unmentioned in the announcement was the recently unearthed old footage from The Man Show in which Kimmel had a recurring bit impersonating NBA star Karl Malone. In the old clips, Kimmel wore blackface, darkened his skin tone around his arms and shoulders and altered his speech patterns.
The Malone footage initially resurfaced last year, but became part of the discourse again after Kimmel’s late night colleague, Jimmy Fallon, apologized for a similar impersonation of Chris Rock on Saturday Night Live from 2000, roughly the same time period as The Man Show.
Fallon has tweeted that it was a “terrible decision” and there is “no excuse.”
Earlier last week Kimmel announced that he would host the 72nd Emmy Awards on September 20th. “I don’t know where we will do this or how we will do this or even why we are doing this,” he joked in a statement, “but we are doing it and I am hosting it.”
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