Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | News | September 16, 2025
One of the big highlights of Sunday’s Emmy telecast was Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show taking home an Emmy over The Daily Show and The Jimmy Kimmel Show. Colbert brought his staff up on stage and gave one of the best speeches of the night. After the political cancellation of The Late Show (despite being the highest rated show in late night), everyone in that audience wanted Colbert to take home the Emmy.
Mostly everyone.
Because, as John Oliver explained on The Jimmy Kimmel Show, a part of him actually wanted Jimmy Kimmel to win. The same Jimmy Kimmel who had been heavily pushing the Emmy campaign for The Late Show. No one wanted Stephen Colbert to win more than Jimmy Kimmel, which is exactly why John Oliver wanted Kimmel to win.
“I will say this,” Oliver told Kimmel on last night’s show. “I know we wanted [Colbert] to win. The right thing to happen was for him to win. The funniest thing to happen would have been if you had won.”
“Most of me wanted him to win. But a part of me — the part of me that I like more — just wanted to see your face go, ‘Oh no! Not like this!’”
Kimmel added that a staffer who wasn’t watching the show checked ChatGPT, which said that Kimmel won and sent it to Jimmy, who worried that ChatGPT knew something that he didn’t know. “Because if we win, it’s a disaster.”
“But it would’ve been so funny,” Oliver continued. “He had his whole staff there. You’d have been booed onto the stage.”
“Maybe stoned.”
“People would be like, ‘Why’d you have to ruin everything,” Oliver continued. “So you can see why a part of me — a part of me that’s getting bigger — did kind of want that to happen. The first ever cutaway — ‘The winner is Jimmy Kimmel — ‘Noooo! Why?!’ It would have been perfect.”
And he’s not wrong.
