"Just Jay and Oprah, speaking titan to titan"
01/29/10 11:15 AM
By ED BARK
Jimmy Kimmel's on fire when it comes to dissing and dissecting NBC's late night horror show.
On Thursday's Jimmy Kimmel Live, he rebutted Jay Leno's contention -- on that day's interview with Oprah Winfrey -- that Kimmel had "sucker-punched" him during a "10 at 10" segment in which Kimmel took the opportunity to mock Leno.
Kimmel's side of it is that Leno asked him to do the segment after enjoying Kimmel's impersonation of him. But the producers of The Jay Leno Show supposedly didn't want to talk about Leno's re-taking of The Tonight Show from Conan O'Brien. Instead, in a run-through of questions, Kimmel was asked to discourse on topics such as his "favorite junk food."
Kimmel instead took matters into his own hands while Leno stuck to the script.
"Ya know, at one time he was a comedian," Kimmel said of Leno on his ABC show. "But he stood there and he just kind of read through the questions like a robot."
Then Leno "rats me out" on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Kimmel said. "That's a sucker punch right there."
It's all in the not-to-be-missed clip below, which also includes excerpts from Kimmel's Jay Leno Show appearance and Leno's response when Winfrey asked him about it. Whammo.