Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert give each other their first interviews after all of that

The two hosts thought airing both interviews near-simultaneously Tuesday night "might be a fun way to drive the president nuts."

By Mary Kate Carr | October 1, 2025 | 9:48am

Screenshot: The Late Show With Stephen Colbert/YouTube

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Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert give each other their first interviews after all of that

With Jimmy Kimmel Live! doing a week of shows in Brooklyn, New York, it was the perfect opportunity to get the two bad boys of late night together. On Tuesday night, Kimmel and Stephen Colbert appeared on each others’ shows, marking the first interview either had given since getting suspended and canceled respectively. The duo swapped notes on being Donald Trump’s nemeses and getting yanked from the air, down to the fact that they both got texts from James Taylor when shit went down. Kimmel asked to see Colbert’s texts, because “I wanna see if JT did a cut and paste on us,” he joked.

As the guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Kimmel walked through how he found out about his suspension for the first time. The audience for that day’s show was already seated when the host took the emergency call from the bathroom. They sent the audience home, but ended up taping the show anyway—suggesting that somewhere, there’s a recording of the monologue that ABC deemed too incendiary to air. JKL!‘s newly-suspended staff served as the audience, eating meatballs and polenta made by a celebrity chef and listening to Howard Jones perform a somewhat ironic rendition of “Things Can Only Get Better.” Kimmel’s first thought after hearing the news, he said, was “I’m never coming back on the air.”

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Thankfully, he did, allowing him to host Colbert on his own show. Colbert recounted finding out about his cancellation from the hosts’ mutual manager James “Baby Doll” Dixon, who waited until after Colbert got back from vacation to break the news. When Colbert returned from his hours-long meeting with Baby Doll, his wife joked, “What happened, did you get canceled?” She later accompanied him to the next day’s taping as moral support for when he broke the news to his staff and to the audience, who cheered him on as he stumbled through the announcement. “The audience thought it was a bit. They started going, ‘You can do it! Come on Stephen! You can do it,’ because I always messed up on the sentence that told them what was happening,” Colbert explained. “And then I got to the sentence that actually told them what’s happening, and they didn’t laugh.” Colbert also brought along a clip of the moment he found out Kimmel had been pulled from the air while he was still taping his own show.

The pair had plenty of barbs for Trump throughout the night—Kimmel joked that having both hosts on both shows simultaneously “might be a fun way to drive the president nuts.” To conclude the interview on The Late Show, Kimmel’s sidekick Guillermo came out to take a couple tequila shots with them. “To good friends, great jobs, and… late night TV,” Colbert toasted on the first shot. On the second, Kimmel pronounced, “One more, to Stephen Colbert!” You can check out the clips below.