Comedian Adam Carolla says Jimmy Kimmel was the first person to ever tell him he had a future in entertainment, tracing their friendship back to an odd encounter over boxing lessons decades ago.
Speaking on Tuesday’s episode of “Hang Out with Sean Hannity,” Carolla recalled that Kimmel, who worked at the time at radio station KROQ under the name Jimmy the Sports Guy, was not a talented boxer but recognized comedic potential in Carolla early on.
“He wasn’t a good boxer, but he was a good comedian, and he was the first guy in my entire life to ever go, ‘You are funny, man. You should be doing this,'” Carolla said.
The two met after Carolla was locked out of the KROQ building at 6 a.m. He spotted someone entering with a key card and asked them to pass along word that a boxing trainer was waiting outside. Twenty minutes later, Kimmel let him in, and the training sessions turned into something else.
“I ended up talking to him more about comedy than I did about boxing,” Carolla said.
On comedians and ‘truth telling’
Carolla also used the conversation to argue that comedians play a crucial role in speaking honestly, warning that society faces trouble when comics lose the ability to joke freely.
“I think comedians need to sort of be truth tellers,” he said.
He pointed to the coronavirus pandemic as a period when he felt that freedom eroded, saying, “they got to the comedians.” Carolla has previously spoken about facing pressure to be canceled over jokes and other content during that time, and has described people who enforce cancel culture in Hollywood and government as “cowards.”
“Once they get to the comedians, we’re in trouble,” he told Hannity. “Because you can get to the union guys because they’re worried about their job, and you can get to the school teachers, and you can get to the politicians. You can get to about everybody because their job is to not get fired. But when you get to the comedians, that’s a bad sign for society. And I was saddened to see that they had gotten to some of the comedians.”
