Jimmy Kimmel would like it known that, yes, he really is friends with Jimmy Fallon.
Kimmel appeared on The Howard Stern Show Monday, where Stern became unusually invested in the idea that the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host doesn’t actually enjoy spending time with his fellow late-night Jimmy as much as he claims.
“I wish you would just come clean: You don’t enjoy being around Jimmy Fallon,” Stern told him.
Kimmel found the accusation more amusing than offensive.
“First of all, I cannot imagine anyone not having fun hanging around with Jimmy Fallon, because Jimmy Fallon, as you know, is a lot of fun,” he replied.
Stern was quick to make clear that he likes Fallon, too. What he seemed unable to shake was a more specific theory: that Kimmel is invested in publicly demonstrating that two competing late-night hosts can be friends.
“I think you desperately want to prove that, ‘Oh, we can all get along,’” Stern told him.
Kimmel laughed off that idea as well.
“Do you think that I have so much free time in my life, and so much open space in my life—I’m going to dinner with Jimmy Fallon this week, as a matter of fact, while I’m here—that I would waste that time maintaining a pretend friendship for no reason whatsoever?” he asked.
Stern’s skepticism is especially curious given that he had a hand in bringing the two Jimmys together in the first place. In 2017, after learning that Kimmel and Fallon occasionally emailed one another but didn’t really socialize, Stern arranged for the two competing hosts to have dinner together.
The relationship apparently stuck.
Fallon has since spent time with Kimmel at his Idaho fishing lodge and, in 2022, even pulled off an elaborate April Fool’s stunt in which they secretly swapped shows for the night, with Kimmel hosting The Tonight Show in New York and Fallon taking over Jimmy Kimmel Live! in Los Angeles.
Kimmel and Fallon’s friendship might have seemed more unusual in an earlier era of late night, when rivalries between hosts could become almost as famous as the shows themselves. The current crop of hosts, by contrast, is famously friendly.
Kimmel and Fallon joined their then-mutual competitor Stephen Colbert, along with Seth Meyers and John Oliver, for Strike Force Five during the 2023 writers strike. The podcast grew out of a private group text among the five hosts, a chain they have said continued after the strike ended.
That camaraderie remains visible well beyond the podcast. Meyers and Oliver are both joining Kimmel during Jimmy Kimmel Live!’s current week of shows from Brooklyn, while Kimmel told Stern he has dinner plans with Fallon while he’s in New York.
Still, Stern seemed reluctant to surrender his theory.
After Kimmel left, Stern told Robin Quivers that he sometimes feels as though he can’t even appear on Fallon’s Tonight Show because Kimmel might be upset about it.
Stern will get another crack at Kimmel tonight, when he joins him as a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in Brooklyn—where the line of questioning may well continue.
