LOS ANGELES - The train horn blares as it approaches. A young, mustached man stands by the track and offers a goofy grin. He is in pursuit of the ultimate millennial thrill, safety be damned. The quest for the perfect selfie.
Jimmy Kimmel, wearing jeans and chewing gum on a Wednesday morning, watches the action on a monitor from the set of the El Capitan Theatre. He's joined by 30 or so staffers. Their task is to decide which clips work for "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" This has potential. As the train rumbles into the frame, it slams into the man's arm - duh, he's standing too close to the track - and the video dissolves into blurry, blue nothingness.
The staffers shout, groan, nervously laugh. The host remains silent, his head bowed from behind his desk.
The old Jimmy, the chubby "Man Show" dude with floppy white sneakers, would probably take the easy road, cashing in a stranger's misery for a cheap chuckle. But what about the new Jimmy, the passionate, eloquent GQ man who has taken on health care, immigration and gun control in recent months, the veteran host whom CNN recently called "America's conscience?"
"Do we know anything about what just happened there?" Kimmel finally asks.
Not sure, somebody tells him.
"Did he live?"
They believe so, though they will have to check.
And then Kimmel pitches an idea.
"Let's do a fake interview," he says, suggesting his sidekick Guillermo be heavily bandaged and in a hospital bed. "We'll make it look like he has no arms and no legs and, like, a little body now."
The bit is about as sensitive as a keg stand and, for longtime fans of Kimmel's show, should offer some comfort. Even as his priorities expand to senatorial races in the Deep South, there's room for tasteless fun. A joke that even Molly McNearney, his wife and the show's co-head writer, mocks him for.
"See you in hell," she writes when she emails Kimmel a script for the piece.
It is quite a time to be Jimmy Kimmel. Sunday night, he'll return to host the Oscars with a growing profile. For years, Kimmel was a kind of also-ran in the late-night battle between NBC's "The Tonight Show" and CBS's "The Late Show," the third wheel to Jay Leno and David Letterman, and later Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert. Then last April, Kimmel and McNearney's son was born with a heart defect and had to undergo emergency surgery. When Kimmel returned to the air to tell his audience about Billy, millions of viewers were moved by something rarely, if ever, seen on late night television: Vulnerability.
Billy would be OK, he assured everyone, but it was tough going. Over the course of 13 minutes, Kimmel cried, made a few self-deprecating jokes and then took a tactical pivot. He connected Billy's battle with a larger issue at hand, namely President Donald Trump's attempts to cut the National Institutes of Health. Suddenly, Kimmel was being discussed on the op-ed pages.
"You can't not remember that night," says Ellen DeGeneres, a longtime friend. "The fact that you're seeing a really strong, smart funny man cry is beautiful. He's not trying to be tough. He's not trying to pretend. He's not trying to act like a talk-show host. And it wasn't salacious. It wasn't to get ratings. It was just raw, and you don't see that on television that much."
In the good, old days - say, before Nov. 8, 2016 - Kimmel didn't have the slightest interest in lobbying for health-care legislation. He had studied late-night TV since he was a kid. Political advocacy seemed like a bad play.
"You never knew what Dave was, you never knew what Jay Leno was, you never knew what Johnny Carson was," he said in his office on a recent afternoon. "I didn't want my jokes to be tainted. I wanted my jokes to be taken as jokes."
He was more than careful. Kimmel masked his political giving by donating everything he and McNearney gave under her name. In the past two years, that ranged from $100 to $2,700 donations to candidates across the country as well as former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords's gun-control campaign.
"He was very pointedly not political," says comedian Sarah Silverman, a longtime friend whom he dated for years. "He didn't want to lose audience. I remember he forwarded me something to host for Katie Couric for gun control because he didn't want to get political, and I was like, gun control?"
Then Trump won.
"This sounds romantic," Kimmel says. "But I've never felt this way about a president before."
After his passionate monologue about Billy, he gave up trying to pretend. He even sent $2,700 to Doug Jones, the Democrat who was running against Republican Roy Moore in Alabama - under his own name.
He also found it almost impossible to keep his emotions in check.
Take his response, in February, to the mass shootingat Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Kimmel's voice quivered at times. But the message was clear. He demanded gun reform and aimed his words directly at Trump.
"If you don't think we need to do something about it," Kimmel said, "you're obviously mentally ill."
- The Washington Post
