The longest-tenured of the current crop of late-night hosts, Jimmy Kimmel has been talking about retirement for the better part of a decade, but in a new interview with Rolling Stone he chose a different tack.
“I’ve realized that there’s no point in talking about it,” said Kimmel, whose current deal ends next year.
The Jimmy Kimmel Live! host last publicly addressed the question a year ago.“I think this is my final contract,” he told the Los Angeles Times in February 2004. “I hate to even say it, because everyone’s laughing at me now—each time I think that, and then it turns out to be not the case. I still have a little more than two years left on my contract, and that seems pretty good. That seems like enough.”
But lest we read too much into his more more recent no comment, Kimmel explained his reasoning, telling Rolling Stone that when he muses about retirement, “It upsets the people I work with.”
The host went on to say that his staff’s well-being is a “huge part of the responsibility” of his hosting career.
“There are a lot of people who won’t have jobs when I retire. That definitely weighs on me,” he said. “I also know there’s not one person who works here who would resent me for retiring. I think they know that when I’m done, I’ll feel like I have done this as long as I possibly can. But you always feel like the bandleader, that when you stop everyone is going to have to find new jobs.”
Kimmel is also presiding over a very different late night landscape than the one he was a part of when he began in 2003, but apparently that’s not something that weighs on him.
“ABC pays me. So ideally, in an ideal world, everybody would watch [our show] on ABC. But it’s just not how it works,” he said. “if you look at YouTube, and you look at all the shows, more people are watching our late-night television than ever were. And that is what any comedian wants.”
Regardless, Kimmel states that sooner or later, it will be time to walk away.
“The reality is I’m not going to do this forever,” he told Rolling Stone. “At a certain point, it is going to have to end.”
His retirement is definitely not needed at this point in time.