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Jimmy Kimmel is back to pondering his retirement from late-night, telling the Los Angeles Times that he thinks his current Jimmy Kimmel Live contract “is my final contract.”
“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,” Kimmel said in a new interview. “I still have a little more than two years left on my contract, and that seems pretty good. That seems like enough.”
As he acknowledged, Kimmel has openly vacillated between continuing and ending his long-running show, which has been on the air for 21 years now. Most notably, he admitted on the Strike Force Five podcast last year that he’d been “intent on retiring right around the time” the Writers Guild of America strike started and all late-night shows went off the air.
“And now,” Kimmel added, “I realize that it’s kinda nice to work. When you are working, you think about not working, but…” (His fellow late-night hosts proceeded to roast his indecisiveness, with Seth Meyers calling Kimmel the “Tom Brady of late-night.”)
Kimmel reiterated this dynamic in his new interview, noting that he’s currently juggling Jimmy Kimmel Live duties with hosting the Oscars. “It’s hard to yearn for it when you’re doing it,” he said. “Wednesday night, I was very tired and I had all these scripts to go through — I had to revise and rewrite all these pitch ideas for the Oscars — and I was literally nodding off onto my computer. In those moments, I think, ‘I cannot wait until my contract is over.’ But then, I take the summer off or I go on strike, and you start going, ‘Yeah, I miss the fun stuff.’”
As to what he might do after delivering his last monologue joke, Kimmel riffed on a few possibilities: “He speaks Italian, he plays the harmonica beautifully. He is an expert fly-fisherman. He does all these different things that I know I’m not actually going to do. He’s drawn some graphic novels that were very well-received. He’s very busy — it’s funny, whenever I think of what I’m going to do when I stop working, it all involves more work.”
