Good news for Jimmy Kimmel: If he wants to fact-check the story Jason Bateman told him Monday night, he can.
Bateman was a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Kimmel took the opportunity to play another round of what he’ s dubbed “The Bateman Game.” Playing off of Bateman’s long life of Hollywood stardom—beginning with Little House on the Prairie in 1981, when Bateman was 12—Kimmel simply names a random celebrity and asks Bateman if he has a story about that person.
This time, Kimmel’s celeb prompts for Bateman came as randomly drawn ping-pong balls from a box adorned with Bateman’s face: the Olsen twins, David Hasselhoff, Kirk Cameron, and Sammy Davis Jr.
Bateman had a story for each of them, but it was the last one that took Kimmel by surprise.
“Really?!” Kimmel replied when Bateman said yes, he did in fact have a story about Davis. “I thought that was going to be a miss!”
Bateman explained that Davis had been the musical guest during one of his own appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
“I told some story to Johnny about having just broken up with a girlfriend,” Bateman recalled. “I was, I don’t know, 13, 14, or something like that. So when Sammy came out and did his song—‘There’s Other Fish in the Sea,’ something like that—he dedicated it to me and then sang the song.”
Lest you think that story is too iconically Hollywood to be true, there’s video proof. LateNighter has dug up the clip of the Tonight Show episode in question, from Feb. 4, 1988—and you can watch the moment here:
Bateman’s memory of the event was understandably muddied. Rather than “13 or 14,” Bateman was actually 19 years old at the time. Davis’ performance was a rendition of “Hello, Young Lovers,” but he does indeed start out the song by dedicating it to “Jason, and all the fishes in the sea.”
Davis’ dedication comes in reference to something Bateman himself told Carson during his interview. Asked how his love life is going, Bateman expressed his hesitance about a girl he was “in a holding pattern” with.
“There’s many fish in the sea,” Bateman told Carson.
“I think you’ve blown this relationship,” the host retorted.
“You were all right until you said ‘the fish in the sea,’” a laughing Davis chimed in.
