Jimmy Kimmel delivers tearful, heartfelt tribute to lifelong friend Cleto Escobedo III
Kimmel's bandleader and "older brother" died Tuesday at 59 years old.
Image: Jimmy Kimmel Live/YouTube; Jeff Golden/WireImage
Jimmy Kimmel opened his Tuesday night show in tears. “We’ve been on the air for almost 23 years, and I’ve had to do some hard monologues along the way, but this one will be the hardest,” the host shared. “Because late last night, early this morning, we lost someone very special who was much too young to go, and I’d like to tell you about him if you don’t mind.” That person was Cleto Escobedo III, Kimmel’s lifelong best friend and eventual bandleader, who died Tuesday at 59 years old. Kimmel used his monologue to deliver an emotional eulogy for his friend, which somehow managed to be both incredibly touching and largely about how “Cleto was very focused on sex from a young age” and “taught me all of it” (even though “half of the everything he taught me was wrong”).
Kimmel took his audience through the day he met Escobedo, who lived across the street when the host was 10 years old. The two quickly became “24/7, ‘mom, please let me sleepover, please’ kind of friends” (one summer Kimmel says he slept over at the Escobedo house 33 nights in a row) and got up to all sorts of shenanigans, including prank calling people, setting fire to Hot Wheels, knocking each other out for fun, and recording a terrible rap album.
