When Jimmy Kimmel got his start in radio during his first year of college, little did he realise he would one day become a household name on another medium: TV.
More than 20 years after he began hosting his own talk show, Kimmel, 58, is not only one of the biggest names in TV but has found himself the nemesis of US President Donald Trump, which intensified after he made a joke about his wife, First Lady Melania.
Behind the scenes, he is a devoted family man and father of four children from two marriages, including son Billy, whose battle with congenital heart disease led him to take aim at the US government over affordable healthcare.
Watch the video above.
Rise to fame
Born James Christian Kimmel in Brooklyn on November 13, 1967, he was the eldest of three children of Joan and James. Kimmel was raised Catholic and served as an altar boy.
When he was nine, the family moved to Las Vegas. He was still at high school when the seed was first planted for a career in the entertainment industry.
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He told Variety in 2016, “I was in high school and a kid I knew … said, ‘You should be on the radio’.”
His uncle had been sending him tapes of Howard Stern, who was then on local radio, and he had read that David Letterman got his start on the airwaves.
“So that started me thinking,” he said.
“I started doing a half-hour Sunday night talk show on college radio station KUNV. That excited me more than anything I’d ever done.
“I went through the Yellow Pages to find people who seemed interesting. I’d goof on these people, but they were so excited to be on the radio that they didn’t even notice.”
A year into his studies at the University of Nevada, his family relocated to Arizona and he enrolled in Arizona State University. He became a regular caller to radio station KZZP’s afternoon show, hosted by Mike Elliott and Kent Voss.
In 1989, he landed his first paying job alongside Voss as morning drive co-host of The Me and Him Show at KZOK-FM in Seattle, but they were fired a year later. They were also reportedly fired from their next job in Tampa, Florida.
According to Variety, Kimmel landed his own show at a station in Palm Springs, which led to a morning show in Arizona and finally LA’s KROQ radio station, where he spent five years as ‘Jimmy the sports guy’ on the Kevin & Bean show.
Despite it never being his plan to get into television, he started writing scripts for free for the duo, who were also on-air announcers at Fox. It led to him receiving a call from Fox asking if he wanted to help out.
“[This guy] said, ‘Want to do promos for us?’ He sent a script for the promo of Party of Five, which was brand new. He wanted my thoughts, I assumed, as a writer. I said, ‘I think this is pretty good and you should leave it as is’.
“He said, ‘OK, come in tomorrow’. Then I got a call asking for my clothing sizes. I thought maybe they were going to give me some free T-shirts.
“I went in and they started putting makeup on me. I didn’t realise I was to be the on-air promo guy.”
He became known as ‘Jimmy the Fox Guy’ and soon started appearing on other shows.
In 1997, he began co-hosting the quiz show Win Ben Stein’s Money on US cable TV channel Comedy Central.
At the same time he began working on comedy sketch program The Man Show.
From ‘promo guy’ to late night icon
In 2002, the ABC was looking for a new talk show to follow its show Nightline.
Kimmel told Variety, “[TV producer] Michael Davies was playing golf with (then-ABC Entertainment chairman) Lloyd Braun and called me and said ‘Make a tape for Lloyd Braun’.
“I sent a tape to Lloyd at ABC and a week later, I got Jimmy Kimmel Live!“
The show was the ABC’s first attempt at a traditional late-night talk show since the 1980s and started to mixed reviews when it first aired on January 26, 2003.
The hour-long show aired weeknights, from 12.05am, and struggled to win an audience, with some ABC affiliates refusing to air it, instead playing reruns.
Kimmel was competing with The Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, but by 2004 he had taken half of Leno’s audience.
Despite its name, it has not been aired live since its first year after an expletive made its way on air. Instead, it is taped in front of an audience at the El Capitan Entertainment Centre (ECEC) in Hollywood.
There were also controversies early on.
The ABC pulled an episode in 2004 during the NBA Finals in Detroit after Kimmel joked fans would “burn the city of Detroit down” if they lost.
There was also a long-running gag that involved Matt Damon coming on the show, only for Kimmel to tell the actor they were out of time for their interview.
A decade after it first went on air, the show moved to the 11.35pm timeslot, where it remains.
Around that time, a Kids Table segment, in which a child suggested killing Chinese people, led to protests and even a White House petition.
Then in 2020, Kimmel apologised after skits he was part of at The Man Show resurfaced showing him in blackface. He was also criticised for racial slurs he once used when imitating Snoop Dogg and for comments he had made to Megan Fox.
Despite the controversies, he has become a highly-paid entertainer, earning a reported $22 million a year just from hosting his show.
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Host with the most
While hosting his talk show, Kimmel also started taking on other roles, even appearing in TV shows and movies – sometimes as a talk show host and other times as himself.
In 2006, he began hosting a quiz show, Set for Life, and he was soon called upon for other hosting duties, including presiding over the ESPY Awards, the American Music Awards, the Primetime Emmy Awards and the Academy Awards, which he has hosted four times.
Life off-screen
Kimmel has been married twice.
His first wife was Gina Maddy, whom he met while they were at college together in Arizona. They married in 1988 and welcomed two children, daughter Katherine in 1991, and son Kevin in 1993, before they divorced in 2002.
That year, he started a relationship with comedian Sarah Silverman. They had met the previous year at a roast for Hugh Hefner that he was hosting and she was performing in.
They dated for six years before splitting up in 2009.
That same year Kimmel began dating Jimmy Kimmel Live! co-head writer Molly McNearney. They became engaged in 2012 and married the following July.
They have two children, Jane, who was born in July 2014, and Billy, who arrived in April 2017.
Within hours of his birth, Billy was diagnosed with a rare congenital heart defect, tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) with pulmonary atresia, and underwent open heart surgery when he was three days old.
He has since undergone two more surgeries.
The last operation took place in 2024, and Kimmel took to Instagram afterwards, writing, “We went into this experience with a lot of optimism and nearly as much fear and came out with a new valve inside a happy, healthy kid,” he wrote.
“Walking around this hospital, meeting parents at their most vulnerable, children in pain and the miracle workers who do everything in their considerable power to save them is a humbling experience.
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“There are so many parents and children who aren’t fortunate enough to go home after five days.”
Kimmel became a grandfather in May last year when Katherine gave birth to a little girl.
Billy’s health battles led Kimmel to become vocal about protecting the US Government’s Affordable Care Act – similar to our Medicare – and he has been scathing of the Trump administration’s threats to dismantle it.
He used the opening monologue of his show in 2017 to criticise Republican Senator Bill Cassidy after he co-authored a congressional healthcare bill designed to eliminate major sections of healthcare laws.
He also supports at least two charities related to paediatric heart problems, the Mighty Oaks Heart Foundation and the Ollie Hinkle Heart Foundation.
The Trump feud
Kimmel’s famed opening monologues became more political around the time Donald Trump was announced as the Republican candidate for the US Presidency in 2015.
By the time Trump took office in early 2017, after winning the 2016 election, Kimmel was critical of many of his policies, especially around health.
“It’s about getting rid of Obamacare, which he hates, primarily because Obama’s name is on it. At this point he would sign anything if it meant getting rid of Obamacare,” Kimmel said at the time.
By March 2024, when Trump was no longer president, the war of words had become so heated that Trump would often take to social media to criticise Kimmel, even when he was in the middle of hosting the Oscars.
It prompted Kimmel to share his ‘review’ live on air.
“Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars? His opening was that of a less-than-average person trying too hard to be something which he is not and never can be,” Kimmel read.
He then replied, “I’m surprised you’re still up, isn’t it past your jail time?” – a response to Trump’s then-legal battles.
Then in 2025, after the cancellation of another late night show hosted by Stephen Colbert, Trump again turned his sights on Kimmel.
“The word is, and it’s a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented late-night sweepstakes and, shortly thereafter, [Jimmy] Fallon will be gone,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding he hoped he “played a major part” in their demise.
During his opening monologue on September 15, 2025, Kimmel commented about the assassination of right-wing commentator and conservation group founder Charlie Kirk.
As a result, other right wing commentators and the head of the Federal Communications Commission called for retaliatory action.
An ABC affiliate said it would not broadcast the show on its stations, leading the Disney-owned ABC to announce it would be “pre-empted indefinitely”, causing Trump to gloat.
“Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done,” he wrote on Truth Social, from his state visit in the UK.
“Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT.”
There was a swift backlash, with many complaining about the loss of freedom of speech, and there was a rush of people cancelling their Disney+ subscriptions and holidays, and even protests outside the Disney-owned theatre where the show it filmed, before it was reinstated days later.
News the show had been reinstated led Trump to again explode, even admitting the White House was involved in the original decision and threatening legal action.
“I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled!” he wrote.
“Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his ‘talent’ was never there.
“Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99 per cent positive Democrat GARBAGE.”
In typical Jimmy Kimmel fashion, he did not back down, using his first two shows to again go after Trump.
“He tried his best to cancel me. Instead, he forced millions of people to watch the show,” he said.
“That backfired bigly. He might have to release the Epstein files to distract us from this now.”
Months later, an episode that aired on April 23 attracted the attention of First Lady Melania Trump.
Kimmel had performed a “light roast” in the spirit of the then-upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he referred to Melania as an “expectant widow”.
“Our First Lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,” Kimmel said during the sketch.
But the comment came back to haunt him when a gun-wielding man tried to enter the venue days later.
It led the First Lady to take to X to call for Kimmel to be sacked after calling him “a coward” who hides behind ABC”.
“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country,” she wrote. “His monologue about my family isn’t comedy – his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.
“People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.
“Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”
President Trump also demanded Kimmel be “immediately fired by Disney and ABC” in a Truth Social post.
But Kimmel defended the joke during his subsequent opening monologue, and argued his skit referred to the 23-year age difference between the president and first lady.
“It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination and they know that. I’ve been very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence in particular,” he said.
“I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject. I think a great place to start to dial that back is having a conversation with your husband about it.”
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