“Weird Al” Yankovic is set to complete his late-night Infinity Gauntlet.
The legendary comedy musician will make his Jimmy Kimmel Live! debut next Thursday, April 16. Kimmel’s show is the only late-night program currently on air that Yankovic has not previously visited.
Asked why it took this long to finally set foot on the 23-year-old ABC talker, Yankovic tells LateNighter, “I think you’d have to ask Kimmel that!”
Yankovic will join Kimmel as an interview guest, but is not expected to perform. (Singer-songwriter Melanie Martinez is the night’s musical guest.)
The parodist—who is out promoting the 2026 run of his Bigger & Weirder Tour—was last seen in late-night as a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in December. His “Colbert Questionnaire” was later released online as a web-exclusive.
The accordion-slinger’s visit with Kimmel will come nearly 45 years to the day that he made his debut in the late-night daypart. On April 21, 1981—in what was in fact his first-ever appearance on national television—Yankovic and drummer Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz performed his Queen parody “Another One Rides the Bus” on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow Show.
That seminal moment in his career “felt like an out-of-body experience,” Yankovic says upon reflection. “We were both scared out of our minds. And we couldn’t wait to do it again!”
To date, Yankovic has notched six appearances on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show over a decade-long span (2015-2025). He has also visited Late Night with Seth Meyers twice, in 2014 and 2022.
One of his three visits to Colbert’s Late Show was a surprise appearance last July in which he and Lin-Manuel Miranda helped cheer up Colbert with a Coldplay song in the wake of The Late Show’s cancellation, appearing alongside Fallon, Meyers, Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Andy Cohen, and Anderson Cooper.
That said, “I haven’t done all of the network late-night shows,” Yankovic notes. “Missed out on Jack Paar,” who hosted The Tonight Show from 1957 to 1962. “Guess he didn’t want a toddler on the couch.”
Above and beyond the superfecta of network late-night shows, Yankovic has appeared on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver twice—including for a rousing performance of a polka-plea to North Korea to spare us from nuclear annihilation.
Kimmel’s Thursday-night lineup also includes Saturday Night Live alum Molly Shannon, who co-stars in the upcoming film comedy Balls Up.
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