Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert on one another’s shows to ‘drive Trump nuts’

US late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert have appeared on one another’s shows in a “fun” format that Kimmel said would “drive the president nuts”.

It comes a week after Kimmel, 57, returned to TV screens after his show was suspended over remarks he made in the wake of the assassination of conservative activist and ally of US President Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk.

In his opening monologue, he said: “My fellow late night host, Stephen Colbert, is here with us.

“It’s the show the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) doesn’t want you to see.

“We’re doing something fun tonight. We’re doing something unprecedented tonight. I think it’s unprecedented. I did not bother to check.

“Tonight, Stephen is a guest on our show. I will simultaneously be a guest on his show. We thought it might be a fun way to drive the president nuts.”

Days after the show was pulled from schedules, Mr Trump claimed Jimmy Kimmel Live! was suspended because Kimmel “is not a talented person” and had “very bad ratings”.

During Tuesday’s show, Colbert talked about CBS cancelling his show, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which will come to an end next May.

In July, Mr Trump wrote on Truth Social: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next.”

Colbert, 61, said he was “so nervous” when he announced the show was ending, “because there was nothing in the prompter, I was just speaking off the cuff”.

He said: “I f***** up twice and had to restart and the audience thought it was a bit and they started going, ‘You can do it. Come on, Steve, you can do it’.

“Because I always messed up on the sentence that told them what was happening, and then I got to the sentence that actually told them what was happening, and they didn’t laugh. And then that’s how I did it.”

He also said that it was “very emotional” when his team won the Emmy award for outstanding talk series in September.

“We got nominated the day before we got cancelled,” he said.

On Colbert’s show, Kimmel said he was in the toilet when he was told his show had been pulled by ABC.

“It was an emotional rollercoaster, I know you hear that a lot, and it really was. It was very strange,” he said.

“It was about three o’clock. We tape our show at 4.30. I’m in my office typing away, as I usually do, I get a phone call. It’s ABC. They say they want to talk to me. This is unusual.

“As far as I knew, they didn’t even know I was doing a show previous to this. So I have a lot of people, I have like five people who work in my office with me, so the only private place to go is the bathroom.

“So I go into the bathroom and I’m on the phone with the ABC executives, and they say, ‘Listen, we want to take the temperature down. We’re concerned about what you’re going to say tonight, and we decided that the best route is to take the show off the air’.”

Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, issued a warning before Kimmel’s suspension which criticised Kimmel’s remarks about the Kirk assassination.

The cancellation of Colbert’s CBS show followed his criticism of a settlement between Mr Trump and Paramount Global, parent company of CBS, over a 60 Minutes story.