Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t talk much about Sarah Silverman in the November GQ, but he does get a makeover into Richard Nixon and a slew of other presidential types.

Jimmy on his breakup with Sarah Silverman, and the public intrigue about it: “They (the public) want to know for the wrong reasons. They don’t care about us. We don’t represent anything to them. People like to gossip. It’s human nature. You can’t really blame them for it. If people are interested, it is by definition interesting. But it’s not always as interesting as people might imagine it is. It’s just, I wouldn’t do that to her. I wouldn’t discuss it in the media out of respect for her, and she feels the same way with me, you know?”

Jimmy on Comedy: “In an hour from now, I’m going to walk out onto a piece of wood we’ve surrounded by lights and cameras, and I’m going to do a show for 250 strangers. It’s so silly. You go out there and you do jokes and show funny little videos, and the audience laughs. But then you go sit behind a desk, and you’re speaking to another person while they watch. It’s like pornography. It really is.”

Jimmy on his guests: “The guests are people I’ve never met. They walk out, and now they’re supposed to have a spontaneous-seeming conversation with me. For between seven and ten minutes. Think about that. In front of a group of other strangers. Hey, you’re gonna watch us have a conversation now! It seems normal because we’re used to it. But it’s not normal. It’s totally abnormal. It’s the least normal way you could possibly meet somebody. Meeting someone in a sex room on Craigs-list is more normal than this.”

Jimmy on letting guests talk … or not talk: “I’m not scared of silence. I just don’t feel like I have to fill every second of a conversation with sound. I’ll pose a question, and then I’ll stop and listen for the answer, and then when they seem to be finished I’ll ask the next question. I have great confidence in my ability to be funny. I really do. Maybe that makes me sound like a jerk, but I’ve always been able to be funny since I was a little kid, and so I don’t have a lot to prove. I figure I have plenty of time to talk. I try to remember that the guests only have seven or eight minutes to talk, and this is a big deal for them, and their parents are probably watching, and I invited them on my show, and that I want them to leave and feel good about it.”

Jimmy on getting an offer to host his own late-night show: “I just couldn’t believe they’d put so little thought into this decision. I mean, it was like buying a house on the Internet.”
On the first months: “After the first six months, I was hoping that the show would get canceled because I figured I really cannot live like this. We used to have to wave people into the show. We couldn’t get guests. That was unpleasant. The audience is sitting there staring at you, and you have on people they’ve never heard of, and they’ve barely heard of you in the first place. That’s just a terrible, terrible — oh, it’s terrible. And then a lot of people who do know you are expecting ‘The Man Show’ and waiting for you to whip them into a frenzy, which I am not a frenzy-whipper. It was terrible.”

Jimmy on Jimmy Fallon’s potential: “I don’t, I don’ t … I don’t like to judge people before they go on. Some people you think are going to be great. I think most people thought Chevy Chase was going to be great. Disaster. He doesn’t seem to have ever recovered from it, really. He went from movie star to disgraced talk-show host. You never really come back after a talk show. That’s the thing. Even now, I hear people speak derisively of Arsenio. And I’m like, Arsenio was on for six years! I mean, really, that’s how your memory serves you, that Arsenio was a failure? His show was a big hit for a long time! But people glue that failure to your forehead. That’s something I live in fear of.”