Jimmy Kimmel addressed his vastly different politics from his longtime friend Adam Carolla on Wednesday.
The late-night host delivered a speech to honor his MAGA-supporting pal, who was receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“Adam and I, as you probably know, don’t agree much when it comes to politics,” Kimmel said from the podium, “but I love him dearly. I’ve never worked with anyone funnier,” he continued, getting choked up as he told the crowd, “I am proud of him. I am.”
The moment comes after Carolla, with whom Kimmel has been friends since 1994, defended the host when Melania Trump called on ABC to fire him over his joke that she had “the glow of an expectant widow” days before the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“That’s a pretty typical roast joke,” Carolla said on his podcast, The Adam Carolla Show, last month.
“It is also a trope—any younger, beautiful woman who’s married to an older guy, especially if the guy’s rumored to be sort of douchey, you would make that joke at any roast,” Carolla added, arguing that Kimmel’s joke couldn’t have been disrespectful without a crystal ball. “When you make a joke, and then nothing happens—like there was no shooting. No one made a thing about it before the shooting.”
The pair’s friendship runs deep, which Kimmel described in detail on Wednesday, despite his friend’s insistence that the “left” is the source of “racism” and “violence” in America.
“He took it upon himself to build my children a playhouse in the backyard,” Kimmel shared of their relationship on Wednesday, after detailing their early days, when Carolla was hired to train Kimmel for a TV boxing match. “We did very little training. We would box for about eight minutes and then drink Snapple and go to lunch,” Kimmel recalled. “As a result, I lost that fight, but I gained a life partner. And if that sounds gay to you, it was, and it is.”
“Adam wasn’t just a boxing instructor. He was a carpenter and turned out to be one of the funniest people I’d ever met,” Kimmel said. “We started going to lunch for hours. We would sit and talk.” Later, they would create The Man Show and Crank Yankers together with producer Daniel Kellison.
Kimmel told Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson, on their IMO podcast last month, “I have some very close friends who think very differently, and I’m OK with that. I understand that people have different life experiences and believe things.” He added, “I know I personally believed certain things to be true for a long time in my life, and realized that they weren’t. And you have to allow for that.”
In 2012, Carolla told The Hollywood Reporter that he switched parties from Democrat to Republican because he was “tired of the whining and the name-calling.”
“If you say you want to beef up the border, they say you’re anti-immigrant,” he complained. “If you want people to show I.D. before they vote, then you’re for voter suppression. If you want women to pay for their own contraception, then you’re anti-women. If you’re for traditional marriage, then you hate gay people.”
As for his friendship with Trump’s staunchest critic in late-night, Carolla told the Will Cain Country podcast in January, “Jimmy knows who I am on a very deep and intimate level,” adding, “You wouldn’t cut the person off because he supported somebody you disagreed with if you knew that person was a good person.”
He concluded, “Jimmy knows me, and he knows I’m not horrible. So, I would assume he thinks I’m misguided.”
