Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert made history on Tuesday night (September 30) with the first-ever late-night crossover, as both hosts appeared on each other’s shows at the same time.
“We’re doing something unprecedented tonight,” Kimmel said at the top of Tuesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! “Tonight, Stephen is a guest on our show. I will simultaneously be a guest on his show. We thought it might be a fun way to drive the president nuts.”
The crossover came amid a tumultuous time for both late-night programs. In July, CBS announced its decision to cancel The Late Show, with the series set to air its final episode in May 2026. Then, two weeks ago, ABC temporarily suspended Kimmel over comments he made on-air about the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Colbert opened up about his cancelation, explaining how he found out the news. Colbert said he first got the news from his and Kimmel’s mutual manager, James “Baby Doll” Dixon, who took him aside for a “fifteen-minute” conversation.
“I come home two and half hours later,” Colbert shared. “And I walk into the apartment, and [Evie McGee-Colbert, his wife] goes, ‘What happened? You get canceled?’ I said, ‘Yes, I did.’”
Colbert said he didn’t tell his staff straight away because they had a show to record the next day. “We couldn’t do a show if I told them because everybody would be bummed out, and I’d be bummed out, so I only told my executive producer,” he explained. “I did the whole show and then when I said goodnight to the audience, I said, ‘OK, nobody leave because we’ve got one more act of the show.’”
He then shared the news with his staff before returning to the stage to record a speech, where he informed the studio audience and viewers at home of the cancelation.
“I was so nervous about doing it right because there was nothing on the [tele]prompter,” he recalled. “I was just speaking off the cuff. … I f***ed up twice and had to restart. The audience thought it was a bit, and they started going, ‘You can do it!’”
Kimmel shared his reaction to first hearing the news, saying he was “just absolutely shocked because it’s not right.”
“That’s nice of you to say. It’s their ball and they can take it home if they want,” Colbert responded.
Kimmel quipped back, “They don’t have any balls, Stephen. Let’s be honest.”
Over on The Late Show, Kimmel shared the story behind his own late-night drama, explaining how he found out his show was being pulled off the air.
The comedian said he received a phone call from ABC at 3 pm on September 17, just an hour and a half before his show was scheduled to film.
“I have like five people working in my office with me, so the only private place to go is the bathroom. The ABC executives say, ‘Listen, we want to take the temperature down. We’re concerned about what you’re going to say tonight, and we decided that the best route is to take the show off the air,’” Kimmel recalled.
He continued, “I said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea’. Then there was a vote, and I lost the vote, so I put my pants back on, I walked out to my office, and I called in some of the executive producers and I said, ‘They’re pulling the show off the air.’”
Kimmel said his initial thought was that this was the end of his show. “‘I’m never coming back on the air.’ That’s really what I thought,” he shared.
The pair also compared notes on who reached out to them amid the chaos, with Colbert saying he heard from a high school friend, Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, and singer-songwriter James Taylor. Kimmel said he also heard from Taylor and wanted to check the texts to “see if JT did a cut and paste on us.”
Later in the interview, Colbert asked Kimmel if he ever imagined that one day the President of the United States would be celebrating his unemployment.
“That son of a b***h,” Kimmel said. “I never even imagined there would ever be a situation in which the President of our country was celebrating hundreds of Americans losing their jobs, somebody who took pleasure in that. That, to me, is the absolute opposite of what a leader of this country is supposed to be.”
Kimmel is recording this week’s shows from the Howard Gilman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, close to where Colbert films his show at the Ed Sullivan Theater.
Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Weeknights, 11:35 pm ET/PT, ABC
The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Weeknights, 11:35/10:35c, CBS