According to “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” executive producer and head writer Molly McNearney, being a late night writer requires a really thick skin, “because 90 percent of what you’re writing in the morning as you’re crying reading the news is rejected. So we are a bunch of losers,” she joked during a recent panel.
During the panel, held inside the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” studio in Hollywood, as seen in the exclusive video above, McNearney was joined by fellow EP and head writer Danny Ricker, who added, “That’s your first rejection of the day, by the way. It’s just another 12 hours of that.” Gary Greenberg, co-head writer and supervising producer on the show also appeared on the panel, and said, “There’s home and away rejections,” clarifying that all those jokes that get pitched in the morning are sent in by the writers working from home, before they come to the studio ready to share new ideas that may or may not make the episode.
Related Stories
“Everybody puts their initials on their pitches,” said Josh Holloway, also a co-head writer and supervising producer on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” “It’s stressful, but it’s such a good check of your work ethic because you can’t phone in something that’s going to have your initials over it,” said Ricker. “There’s an element of accountability and stakes,” said Holloway.
Keep in mind, just from that morning pitch session, which starts at 7 a.m. and ends at 8:50 a.m., the writers generate 40 pages of ideas that are then sent to Kimmel, and usually whittled down to two or three pages. “It’s really probably one of the most stressful parts of being a late night writer. One of the most fun parts too, where you can come up with a sketch idea and you’re like, ‘OK, I was half awake in my sweatpants when I came up with this.’ And then, ‘Oh, all of a sudden Jimmy wants to do it.’ And you start getting calls from our production team,” said Ricker. “‘OK, we found a house already to shoot in. We cast a pope, and you said, you want two dogs? That’s kind of expensive. Can we do one dog?’ You go, ‘Yeah, that’s fine.’ And then you’re on site shooting a sketch that then comes back here, and gets edited and shown to Jimmy. And Jimmy gives lots of notes.”
In fact, Holloway revealed that when they have a working monologue script on Google Docs, complete with clip cues and everything, Kimmel “goes in like a Pacman and edits it and chases us. You need to be a little bit ahead so that he won’t catch up to you. And he’s very fast,” said the writer. “He is physically rewriting the monologue and he’s obviously using what the group is doing, but he’s making it his own.”
Given the state of the world, there are more and more days where the team will then have to flip the script in order to keep that night’s episode as topical as possible. It helps that a small number of writers submit their jokes in the afternoon, but everyone tries to be adaptable, especially Kimmel. “It’s not great for your nervous system, but it’s very exciting with this team of people. They’re so good at it. And Jimmy’s so good at just being flexible and pivoting, and I love us all getting in a room and just [saying] ‘OK, what are we doing now?,’” said McNearney.
“Jimmy always said to us, our directive is to talk about the things that people are talking about. And so whenever that happens to happen, we need the pivot,” said Ricker. Greenberg recalls one particular pitch he was excited about, that did not make it to air to account for the news of the day: “We got a stuffed raccoon with the meth pipe in an RC car trying to go in the studio. Trump fucked that up.”
Politics has changed the show in such a way to where Kimmel hardly ever makes jokes about TV shows like “American Idol,” but the silver lining has been the material becoming more personal. “We’re not journalists. He’s a comedian. So there’s always a fine balance of, can we be funny? Can we not be funny? We need to, what’s going to happen? And those times are a little more darkly stressful,” said McNearney. “I actually feel so much closer to the people I work with because I feel like we’re all on this team for good, whether people are listening or not, it feels good to at least have a place to put it.”
As the summer approaches, the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” writers are preparing for the late night comedian to take a vacation, with a bevy of celebrity guest hosts taking his place — a challenge that is pretty unique to their show. “It feels like a totally different job from how it is with Jimmy,” said Ricker. “Many aspects of it are the same, and we’re in this same studio and all that kind of stuff. But there are times where sometimes we’ll get somebody here and we’ll go, ‘Oh, you have never read a teleprompter before? Alright, it’s time for teleprompter school.’ And then they’ll stand right here, and they’ll try it, and they’ll go ‘Should I wait for the audience to stop laughing before I tell the next joke?’ And we go, ‘Yes, you should do that. Great idea.’”
The head writer added, “We have gotten to work with such an insanely fun array of people to guest host the show,” even the pair of actors who led the most successful live action film of 2024. “Last year, our corporate overlords at Disney were like, ‘Hey, do you want Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman to host a show?’ We go, ‘We sure do.’ And they go, ‘Alright, they can get there at 12:30.’ And we tape our show at 4:00,” said Ricker. “So we met them for the first time at 12:30. And we’re like, ‘You’re doing a show in three and a half hours with us. Great, here we go.’ And we sat at this desk and we wrote the whole monologue. And that was such a pressure cooker situation. But when we have a host that gets dropped in who’s just great and excited to do it, there’s this really fun adrenaline that comes with that.”
Holloway said, “We decided after the first summer that it would be better for the hosts and for the staff if we just did a mini version of our show. So we really do write it the day of with those guest hosts. We don’t just write it ahead of time because then it doesn’t feel like we’re doing our show, and it doesn’t feel like they’re doing our show. And so it really is a lot. It’s a fast version of what we’ve just talked through with the difference that there is more talking and we rehearse more.”
Sharing his experience of quickly training these guest hosts, Greenberg said, “We’ve had actors on, and in the rehearsal they would deliver a joke and they’d kind of swallow the punchline and we’d say, ‘That’s the punchline.’ And they’d say, ‘Well, I want the audience to believe that I really mean it.’ And I’m like, ‘No, you just want him to laugh.’ Don’t do that.”
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” has had around 100 guest hosts, meaning that the writing staff has become “able to channel that and work and write in all these different people’s voices,” said an impressed Holloway. After their time on the show, the guest hosts “also all leave here and they don’t understand how Jimmy does this,” said McNearney. “They’re like, ‘How the hell do you guys do this every single night?’”
For the full conversation with “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” writers McNearney, Ricker, Greenberg, and Holloway, watch the video above.
