Unlike his late-night talk show host brethren, Jimmy Kimmel didn't start his professional life as a comedian or comedy writer — he was a radio guy. At age 16, he landed a spot on a college radio station, a Sunday night interview program. "I would talk to local oddballs," Kimmel told HuffPost. While enrolled at Arizona State University in the late 1980s, he landed his first paid radio gig at a Phoenix, Ariz. station, which he took on full-time after he got married.
Radio can be an itinerant, feast-or-famine profession, with downsizing, format changes, and moving to where the jobs are all constant threat to job stability. About a year after he started working for that Phoenix station, the whole staff got laid off, and he jumped to a job in Seattle, Wash. He got fired from that gig after less than a year, and the same thing happened with his next job, at a Tampa, Fla. station. Kimmel then landed a spot in Palm Springs, Calif., and proved so popular that a larger radio station in Tucson, Ariz., lured him away...only to let him go after 11 months on the air. He finally found lasting success in Los Angeles radio (which led to his career-making TV gigs).
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