Leno, Kimmel Mash Up Late Night

Sun., Jan. 6, 2008 5:22 PM PST by Gina Serpe

It's not exactly a meeting of Dave and Oprah proportions, but Jay Leno and Jimmy Kimmel are planning an unlikely late-night lovefest of their own.

The talk-show hosts, who both returned to the airwaves last Wednesday without their respective writing teams and with picketers outside their respective studios, are turning into unlikely allies in the late-night race, with both agreeing to appear as guests on each other's shows next Thursday, in the wake of a writers' strike-induced guest drought.

"If Jay and I can come together and guest on each other's shows, surely there is hope for peace in the Middle East," Kimmel said in a joint statement released by ABC and NBC Sunday morning.

"There are only a few people in the world who know how tough this job is," Leno said. "Jimmy is one of them. It will be fun to discuss who's a good guest, who's a difficult guest and everything else that comes with sitting behind these desks."

The mutual back scratching will help fill not only headlines but what's proving to be hard-to-populate guest slots for the late-night shows since their return to air.

Unlike Late Show with David Letterman and Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, both owned by Letterman's Worldwide Pants, neither NBC's Tonight Show with Jay Leno nor ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live! were able to broker interim deals with the Writers Guild of America before going back on air and therefore have been placed on the Screen Actors Guild's no-fly-zone for guest appearances.

Ditto Late Night with Conan O'Brien, which due to his cross-country filming location is not privy to his peers' game of host-guest musical chairs.

Leno and Kimmel's sudden BFF status is an odd one. Not only are the twosome on competing networks and air, at least for a portion of their respective time slots, opposite each other, but Kimmel has in the past never been shy about expressing his favor of Letterman's particular brand of comedy over Leno's.

However, according to the New York Times, the twosome has struck up an unlikely bond since the writers' strike began, and unlike their CBS cohorts, both are now "one man versus a monologue" as they soldier on with their shows without the aid of scribes. Per the paper, it was Leno who first extended the guest invitation to Kimmel, who reciprocated in gimmicky kind.

And while Leno has teetered on the brink of violating guild rules since returning to the air, penning his own monologue jokes, despite supposedly standing in solidarity as a striking writer, Kimmel himself has voiced disapproval of the strict code and unwavering solidarity he's meant to display with his unemployed wordsmiths.

"I don't want to depart too much from the party line, but I think it's ridiculous," he said on his first night back of the strike and SAG's insistence that members avoid the late-night shows that did not score a WGA-sanctioned agreement. "Jay Leno, he paid his staff while they were out. Conan did the same thing. I don't know. I just think at a certain point you back off a little bit."

Later, he stripped his opinions of all party-line vestiges, saying flat out, "I'm pissed off, I'll be honest with you."

The twin appearances are both scheduled to take place Jan. 10.