Without David Letterman, there would be no Jimmy Kimmel.
On the eve of Letterman’s retirement, the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host paid tribute to the Late Show host. Kimmel’s emotions got the best of him early on. “Oh, no,” he said, looking at band leader Cleto Escobedo III. “When I was 15 years old…All right. Let me start over,” he said, tears welling in his eyes.
“I wanted to be an artist as a kid and I loved to draw, and every night after my parents went to bed I would sit at my desk in my room and I would draw until it was very late. While I was doing that, I would watch a television show that is very important to me, as you can tell. It was called Late Night With David Letterman.”
“Let me collect myself here,” Kimmel said, drying his eyes.
“If you watched it without paying attention, it was a lot like The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. They had guests and an audience and a band, but it was weird. Even though it looked like every other talk show, it wasn’t. It was totally original, primarily because the host of the show. He never pretended to be excited. His way of saying things was so subtle that a lot of times the people he was talking to didn’t know he was joking.”
Kimmel then shared one of his favorite Letterman bits.
