Jimmy Kimmel has endured a lot of psychological bumps and bruises along the way to becoming
a king of late night.
From personal problems to professional failures, here are some of the most harrowing things
to ever happen to him.
Unlike some of his late-night talk show brethren, Kimmel didn't start his professional life
as a comedian.
Instead, he worked in radio.
At the age of 16, he landed a gig with a Sunday night interview program on a college radio
station.
While he was attending Arizona State University in the late 80s, he landed his first paid
radio gig at a station in Phoenix, which he took on full-time after he got married.
Radio can be an itinerant, feast-or-famine profession.
Downsizing, format changes, and moving to where the jobs are are all constant threats
to job stability.
About a year after Kimmel started working for that Phoenix station, the entire staff
was laid off, so he jumped to another job in Seattle, Washington.
He got fired from that gig after less than a year, and the same thing happened with his
next job at a station in Tampa, Florida.
"There were good reasons for my termination."
"Like what?"
"I would tape my boss in our meetings and then play them back on the air the next day."
"Oh my gosh, that's a great idea."
Kimmel then landed a spot in Palm Springs, California and proved so popular that a larger
station in Tucson, Arizona lured him away, only to let him go after 11 months.
After all that hardship, he finally found lasting radio success at KROQ in Los Angeles,
which led to his career-making TV gigs.
After enrolling at Arizona State, Kimmel met a young woman named Gina Maddy.
In quick order she became his first girlfriend ever, and soon after that, they got married.
At the time of their wedding in 1988, Kimmel was only 20 years old.
As he explained to Huffington Post,
"We were both very young.
My mom was 19 when she got married, so it didn't seem unusual to me.
It seemed unusual to all my friends, but not to me."
By 1993, the Kimmels had two children, a daughter named Katie, and a son named Kevin.
They separated in April 2003, and then Gina filed for divorce in June of that year after
she tired of her husband's workaholic tendencies.
After working the early morning shift at KROQ, he would then commute to Comedy Central and
put in another full-time shift as host of Win Ben Stein's Money.
Not only did the stress and financial worry over moving around from job to job strain
the marriage, but so did Kimmel never being around or having much of himself to offer
his family after he became successful.
Kimmel wasn't ABC's first choice as it entered the late night game.
Attempts to lure David Letterman and Jon Stewart in 2002 proved unsuccessful, so the network
took a chance on Kimmel, who was then hosting Comedy Central's The Man Show.
That relative obscurity contributed to the early, rocky run of Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Most late night shows are recorded earlier in the day before they air, but the early
episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live! actually were live, so any mishaps couldn't be edited out.
And in those initial weeks, there were bad moves aplenty.
On the very first episode, guest co-host Snoop Dogg kept censors on their toes as he flashed
a middle finger three times.
Two days after the show's debut, the network revoked its liquor license.
The set had featured a bar where the studio audience could acquire boozy drinks.
But then one woman drank too much and vomited on her chair, very close to a network executive.
The reviews weren't great either, with The Hollywood Reporter noting,
"It's been reported that Kimmel has a budget for writers, but nothing in the premiere indicated
any had been hired."
Turning out a show every night, sometimes without much of anything planned, took a toll.
In 2015, Kimmel told a South by Southwest panel that he hoped for a cancellation that
first year.
As he put it,
"I was burnt out, exhausted, terrified.
I wanted them to cancel it, so I didn't have to quit."
On April 21, 2017, Kimmel and his wife, comedy writer Molly McNearney, welcomed their second
child, a baby boy named William John.
But what was a happy and wondrous event soon turned into a nightmare.
A problem became clear just a few hours after William was born.
A pediatric nurse identified a heart murmur in the newborn, along with a slight purple
tint to his skin.
A team of doctors and nurses determined that William didn't have enough oxygen in his blood.
That suggested something wasn't right in either his lungs or his heart.
Neonatal staff eventually pinpointed the issues: a blocked pulmonary valve and a hole in an
interior wall of his heart.
At just three days old, William had to undergo open-heart surgery.
"And the operation was a success.
It was the longest three hours of my life."
Baby William made it through the surgery, along with a second surgery seven months later.
On April 21, 2019, Kimmel marked the very happy occasion of his healthy son's second
birthday on Instagram, along with the caption,
"We are grateful always to the nurses and doctors at @CedarsSinai & @ChildrensLA who
saved his life and all of you who prayed & sent positive thoughts our way."
Part of what has made Jimmy Kimmel Live! so different from its slickly produced competition
is its folksy, let's-put-on-a-show vibe.
That has a lot to do with Kimmel stocking his staff with close friends and family members.
For many years, the show's sidekick role was filled by the white-haired security guard,
"Uncle Frank."
That's not just a nickname befitting the gregarious Frank, as he was actually Kimmel's uncle.
Frank Potenza was a veteran of the Korean War who worked as a police officer for 20
years along with stints doing security in Las Vegas and at St. Patrick's Cathedral in
New York City.
In August 2011, his eight-year tenure as the most authentic presence in late night came
to a sad and abrupt end when he died of cancer at the age of 77.
His passing happened while the show was on hiatus, and on the first episode back, the
host delivered a tearful monologue in which he eulogized his uncle.
"Uncle Frank loved being a part of this show.
And I wanna say thanks to my co-workers who talked to him and visited him."
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