Jimmy Kimmel wasted no time addressing the elephant in the room as he returned to Jimmy Kimmel Live! Tuesday night after nearly a week away. Looking into the camera, he opened with a line pulled straight from late-night history: “As I was saying before I was interrupted…”
The remark wasn’t simply a joke. It was a callback to Jack Paar, the second host of NBC’s Tonight Show, who stunned viewers 65 years ago by quitting on air after censors cut one of his jokes. As he walked off his show on February 11, 1960, Paar famously declared, “There must be a better way of making a living than this.”
For nearly a month, guest hosts filled in while NBC worked behind the scenes to woo Paar back. When he finally returned, Paar opened with the same words Kimmel used Tuesday: “As I was saying before I was interrupted.” He went on to recall his final comment about there being a better way of making a living, then added a second line that became legend: “I’ve looked, and there isn’t.”
By borrowing Paar’s comeback, Kimmel placed his own suspension in the lineage of late-night defiance. Paar’s walk-off remains one of the most dramatic moments in late-night history, a flashpoint that cemented his reputation as brilliant, mercurial, and unpredictable.
Kimmel’s echo of that moment serves a different but equally calculated purpose. Rather than treating his absence as punishment, he reframed it as an interruption—a pause in the conversation with his audience that he now controls again.
The move also signals Kimmel’s awareness of his place in late-night history. Hosts spar with their networks, whether it be Paar in 1965, Letterman in 1992, or Conan O’Brien in 2010, but the audience remembers the moments when the host seizes control. On Tuesday night, Kimmel did just that.
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Jimmy set the right tone….at first. He is forgetting that he must woo two conservative owned station groups back to his show. Robert Deniro is not going to help with that. LOL.
He ain’t apologizing to no one, sorry not sorry to hafta tell you!
My guess is that this has little to do with their owners’ politics — they’re just afraid of Trump’s FCC, so they’re doing what they were told.
Poor wittle magat snowflake
Say what you will about Jimmy Kimmel, he knows his talk-show history!
Thank You! Kimmel’s salutatory sentence last night seemed instantly PERFECT — not mysterious, cleverly appropriate for the circumstances. His full monologue is now the Gettysburg Address of late-show host remarks.
— I watched Jack Paar at the time. Your story captures the shock well. But I had not realized that “As I was saying before I was interrupted…” was Paar’s opening in 1960.
— Hurray to Jimmy and his writers. I don’t know how his team operates. Kimmel is a very smart man by himself, but smart people do even better when they find other smart people to collaborate with. In a really good team, they may not even recall now who came up with the Jack Paar allusion. But they got it done, and added one more flash to an unforgettable performance. Thank you for this report. Carry on.