{"id":246125,"date":"2025-10-23T13:10:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T13:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/246125\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T13:10:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T13:10:09","slug":"jimmy-kimmel-says-jon-stewart-almost-got-his-hosting-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/246125\/","title":{"rendered":"Jimmy Kimmel says Jon Stewart almost got his hosting job"},"content":{"rendered":"

If it had been up to Jimmy Kimmel<\/a>, Jon Stewart<\/a> would probably be hosting a show in the time slot for ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

The network was about to hire The Daily Show host when a producer Kimmel worked with on the ’90s game show Win Ben Stein’s Money suggested that the head of the network watch video of him, Kimmel explained Wednesday on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name<\/a> podcast.\n<\/p>\n

He watched the tape and said, “I think this might be the guy,” Kimmel said. The even higher-ups agreed, and Kimmel was called in for a meeting under “false pretenses.”\n<\/p>\n

Late-night TV hosts Jon Stewart and Jimmy Kimmel.<\/p>\n

Randy Holmes\/Disney via Getty\u00a0<\/p>\n

“They called me in and they said that they wanted to meet with me about a Thursday night variety show, which I was not interested in,” Kimmel said. “And they said, ‘Come on, meet the president of ABC.’ I went in, we never talked about me doing a show. He just asked me a bunch of questions about [CBS late-night host David] Letterman. And we talked about Letterman for like 90 minutes.”\n<\/p>\n

As Kimmel recalled it, that was apparently all that was needed for the suits to hire him.<\/p>\n

“But it was a very strange thing, because Jon and I had the same manager. Now he’s in the difficult position of having to tell Jon, like, ‘You’re not going to ABC, but Jimmy is going to ABC.'”\n<\/p>\n

He added, “That was a mistake by the way. They definitely should hire Jon. If I’m in that position, there’s no question I hire Jon. One hundred times out of a hundred.”\n<\/p>\n

Kimmel noted that he heard later that it had been helpful that he was “cheaper.”\n<\/p>\n

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Both Stewart and Kimmel have done more than okay for themselves since then, and they’ve become friends.\n<\/p>\n

In fact, much of late-night \u2014 past and present \u2014 came together last month after Kimmel was taken off the air<\/a> indefinitely following comments he made about the “MAGA gang” response to the man who killed right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. The show went dark for six days amid pressure from the Trump administration and affiliate groups.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Listen to Kimmel’s full conversation above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If it had been up to Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart would probably be hosting a show in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":246126,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-246125","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}