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Jimmy Kimmel cried while honoring Adam Carolla at the podcaster’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony Wednesday, calling him his “life partner” since 1994.
Jimmy Kimmel got teary-eyed Wednesday afternoon while honoring his longtime collaborator Adam Carolla at the podcaster’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony. The late-night host opened with their 1994 meeting and closed somewhere around the words “life partner.”
Variety covered the speech in full. Variety’s on-the-scene transcript of Kimmel’s speech and his Laverne-to-my-Shirley line notes that Carolla received his star in the Radio category, with podcaster Dr. Drew Pinsky and emcee Adam Weissler also speaking at the ceremony.
Their story began on KROQ. Kimmel recalled meeting Carolla in 1994, when the future late-night host was working on the Los Angeles morning show Kevin and Bean and a then-boxing-instructor Carolla called in to help prepare him for a charity match.
The first on-air pass was a roast. “Adam told Kevin and Bean, ‘Jimmy is 160 pounds of pure chiseled steel. Unfortunately, he weighs 225,'” Kimmel recounted from the dais.
The training, by Kimmel’s telling, was nominal. “We did very little training. We would box for about eight minutes and then drink Snapple and go to lunch.”
The fight did not go well, but the friendship stuck. “As a result, I lost that fight, but I gained a life partner,” Kimmel said. “And if that sounds gay to you, it was and it is.”
The audience laughed. Kimmel then framed Carolla as “one of the funniest people” he had ever met and described him as “the Laverne to my Shirley.”
The politics elephant got a single nod. “Adam and I, as you probably know, don’t agree much when it comes to politics, but I love him dearly,” Kimmel said, drawing a line under the public ideological gap between the two without belaboring it.
The biographical material was Kimmel-grade roast-warmth. “This is a guy who worked his way up from nothing to become, literally, a millionaire,” Kimmel said, “and if you don’t believe it you’ll hear him say it every single show.”
The location got worked in too. “Adam is a true original. He was a poor kid from the San Fernando Valley who was rejected by the management at Taco Bell, and whose name will now forever be part of this filthy, disgusting intersection,” Kimmel said, gesturing at the corner where Carolla’s star had been laid.
The pair’s joint résumé runs deep. Through their company Jackhole Productions, Kimmel and Carolla co-created The Man Show for Comedy Central and later launched Crank Yankers, with Carolla subsequently hosting the network’s Too Late before pivoting to The Adam Carolla Podcast full time.
Reddit picked up the moment instantly. The r/entertainment thread on Kimmel’s life-partner toast and the audience reaction began circulating within hours of Variety’s piece, with commenters keying on the gap between the pair’s public politics and the depth of the tribute.
IMDB’s wire pickup ran the same line. The aggregator’s syndication of the Walk of Fame highlights and Kimmel’s emotional close preserved the “it was and it is” punchline that anchored most of the day’s coverage.
Carolla, a New York Times bestselling author, has built one of the most-downloaded podcasts in the format. Wednesday’s star marks the formal Hollywood institutional nod after roughly three decades of radio, television, and podcasting work.
Kimmel ended on the same register he started. The man he met in 1994 to help him lose a boxing match is now, by his own definition and on the public record, his life partner.
