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Kimmel gives students what they want in DPU appearance
Two of the hallmarks of live entertainment have always been: Give the audience members what they want and leave them wanting more.
Late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel executed both moves well Saturday night in an Ubben Lecture appearance at DePauw University.
From Kimmel's first remarks following a brief introduction by moderator Tom Chiarella to his closing group selfie with the crowd, he played to his audience of primarily college students.
Just after the students settled back into their seats after giving Kimmel a standing ovation at the outset, he had the DePauw crowd in the palm of his hand.
"Yeah, I was invited to go to Wabash tonight," he said, "but I said I'd rather die than go see that pack of deadbeats."
But he also couldn't resist poking the bear a time or two when DePauw was mentioned, responding as if to clarify things with "that's DePauw -- in Indiana -- with a 'W.'"
Students invited him to play beer pong following the lecture. Or to come to a frat party with some bad beer and cheap vodka.
The 46-year-old Kimmel, of course, declined. Well, sort of.
"If I did that," he told the fraternity brother who made the latter invitation, "I'd probably never leave. And about December, you'll be saying, 'All right, already.'"
After one coed asked a serious, lengthy question about the state of comedy, Kimmel was moved to respond that judging by her vocabulary, he wasn't sure he even went to a real college, adding, "I'm probably the dumbest person in this room tonight."
When the next coed asked about his most embarrassing college moment, the answer was somewhat surprising after Kimmel suggested, "Oh, man, they were all embarrassing."
Kimmel, who had earlier said he has "such a fear of bombing in any situation," told of taking a Scantron test (where you use a No. 2 pencil to fill in the circle to the appropriate answer) for a class but forgetting to bring a pencil.
Too embarrassed to ask anyone for a pencil, "I just took a zero," Kimmel admitted.
But his best interaction with students came when a coed named Megan asked if he would talk to her mother if the student called her from Kresge Auditorium on her cell phone.
Kimmel, one of driving forces behind "Crank Yankers" (where comics like Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Tracy Morgan and Dane Cook made prank phone calls with Muppet-like characters portraying the callers on air), couldn't resist the possibilities.
Using an accent, Kimmel tried to convince the woman he'd found Megan's phone "at the school."
However, reaction from the 1,200 or so students, parents and friends watching in the 1,400-seat auditorium soon spoiled the surprise, which was obvious as the mom on the other end of the phone laughed along with the joke.
That's when Kimmel changed course, telling the woman he was sorry to tell her that her daughter had passed away.
"It was on a boulder run (a longtime DePauw streaking tradition, for the unenlightened)," he said. "She looked behind her and saw President Brian Casey, and ran headfirst into the boulder. Sorry you had to find out like this."
Making crank phone calls, Kimmel said, is "the one thing I'm really good at. It's my greatest gift."
And one that got him invited to parties with the cool kids in high school.
"I used to get invited by them just to make crank phone calls," he told the Kresge crowd. "Then those same people would beat me up when I got to school."
For the first 30 minutes, Chiarella, the DPU creative writing professor who interviewed Kimmel in his role as writer-at-large for Esquire magazine, asked questions as he and Kimmel analyzed comedy in general and dissected how Kimmel went from small-time radio to big-time late-night hosting.
Pointing to a seminal moment in his youth, Kimmel said his family didn't get a color TV until 1983, but when they did, he snatched the old 12-inch black-and-white set and stashed it in his bedroom where he spent his youth glued to "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson, David Letterman and other talk shows.
But it was the Hoosier Letterman that he idolized. Yet it never occurred to him as a kid, Kimmel admitted, that he could get involved with such a program.
"I was in love with David Letterman," he said, "but it never occurred to me that I ought to try to be a writer on his show or something. I just thought maybe I would go see it some time."
In a bit of role reversal, the stage at Kresge was set up with Chiraella behind a large desk (with a fake microphone, as Kimmel soon pointed out) and Kimmel in the big comfy chair to his left.
"The desk offers a measure of security," Kimmel suggested.
"There's no reason for it to be a desk," he said, sounding very Seinfeld-like. "It's not like I'm working and people are coming up, and I'm like, 'Can I help you?'"
Kimmel said he was surprised when ABC, which had never had a late-night talk show, offered him the job as host. The network didn't know what it was doing in the late-night genre, he said.
"The fact they hired me in the first place is evidence of that," Kimmel laughed.
The first few years provided "many dark days," he said, adding that he initially even hoped the show would be canceled rather than plug along with lousy guests and low viewership.
"There really was not as much preparation as you'd think there should be," he said, "for something like a billion-dollar operation."
But obviously things have gotten much better and Kimmel is now critically acclaimed and the show is a TV mainstay.
Proof of that is the reaction to his annual Halloween candy bit in which he asks parents to videotape themselves telling their children that while they were asleep, mommy and daddy ate all their trick-or-treat candy.
It is once again currently an Internet sensation.
"I love the little kids that are all sweet and say, 'that's OK,'" Kimmel said, indicating the little girl who goes wild and throws things, however, is another story.
"I wouldn't have posted that one," he said. "I think that might be an indictment of my parenting."