Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel revealed he never thought his show would come back during an interview with fellow host Stephen Colbert on Tuesday's "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert."

"It was about 3:00. We tape our show at 4:30. I’m in my office typing away as I usually do. I get a phone call. It’s ABC. They say they want to talk to me. This is unusual," Kimmel told Colbert during Colbert's show, recounting how he found out about his suspension. "I’m on the phone with ABC executives and they say 'Listen, we want to take the temperature down. We are concerned about what you’re going to say tonight, and we decided that the best route is to take the show off the air.'"

Disney briefly suspended ABC’s "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" after the host’s remarks about the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk sparked widespread backlash. After an about-face from Disney, the liberal comedian returned last Tuesday. 

"I said, I don’t think that’s a good idea, and they said, ‘Well, we think it’s a good idea.’ And then there was a vote and I lost the vote," Kimmel continued, explaining that he told his staff. "I thought, that’s it. It’s over. It is over. I’m never coming back on the air. That’s really what I thought."

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Kimmel said his audience was already in their seats when he got the news, and he had to send them home. 

"And I walked out to my office and I called in some of the executive producers. There are about nine people in there and I said ‘They’re pulling this off the air.’ My wife said I was white, I was whiter than Jim Gaffigan when I came out of there," he said. 

He addressed the remarks that led to his suspension when his show returned last week. 

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"If you like me, you like me. If you don’t, you don’t. I have no illusions about changing anyone’s mind. But I want to make something clear, because it’s important to me as a human, and that is – you understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man," he said.

CBS announced in July that Colbert's show would end after its season ends in May 2026, and said in a statement it was a "purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night."

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After Disney announced that Kimmel's show would return, Colbert praised the news during his late-night show. 

"You know, I'm so happy for them. Plus, now that Jimmy's not being canceled, I get to enjoy this again," Colbert said during the Sept. 22 episode, holding the Emmy Award his show recently won. "Once again, I am the only martyr in late-night."