The epic story of Jimmy Kimmel and Matt Damon is well known by now. What started as a running gag that saw Damon repeatedly “bumped” from Jimmy Kimmel Live turned into a sort of faux feud, sort of on par with the ongoing battle between Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds.
As with that pair, in reality, Kimmel and Damon are good friends. Although being friends apparently doesn’t mean that one isn’t at risk of dying at the house of the other. In a recent interview with Variety, Jimmy Kimmel revealed that Matt Damon nearly choked to death at his house once. The late-night host revealed…
Matt Damon was over at my house one night for dinner. I made pork ribs. He came late, was very hungry, and started eating fast. He started choking on a pork rib. It was stuck in his throat for about an hour and a half.
We’ve probably all been there, where we end up eating too fast and food doesn’t quite go down as we planned. Yet this sounds like an absolute nightmare where Damon had a big piece of food lodged in his throat. Clearly it wasn’t entirely blocking his airway, but it was doing so enough to cause a problem.
Having anybody seriously choking in your house has to be a stressful situation, but having a choking Matt Damon in your house has to be utterly bizarre. For the record, everybody did try the Heimlich Manuveur, which has saved celebrities before, but it was repeatedly unsuccessful. They considered taking Damon to a hospital before eventually finding a home remedy that ultimately worked. Kimmel continued…
His brother was there. I said, ‘We have got to get him to the hospital,’ because if he dies in my house, I’m going to prison for the rest of my life. I will never be able to explain this as anything other than a murder. We did a lot of YouTube-ing and finally concluded that eating little bits of bread was the way to get that rib to work its way down into his stomach — and bread saved him. We tried the Heimlich many times. It was too far down.
With the near tragedy behind, it’s much easier to laugh at the situation, because of course, if Matt Damon was going to choke to death at anybody’s house, it would be Jimmy Kimmel’s. If something terrible had happened there would certainly have been some dark jokes about the circumstances, even Kimmel makes the comment that he would “never be able to explain” what really happened if Damon had died.
Luckily, nothing terrible happened, and we can continue on with more hilarious shenanigans with Jimmy Kimmel and Matt Damon, like Damon’s recent appearance on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. But maybe next time Damon comes over for dinner they can have soup.