Jimmy Kimmel asks questions, then splits before anyone can ask HIM ...

No sooner did ABC entertainment chief Stephen McPherson open the floor for questions than "Tom Weinerman from the Sarasota Star-Herald Tribune" asked, "There are rumors that ABC is actively courting Jay Leno for 11:30. Is there any truth to those rumors?" From the peals of laughter coming from the network seats it didn't take long to figure out that Jimmy Kimmel was holding the mike.

"I don’t really feel comfortable answering that in this forum," said McPherson. "What’s the follow-up?"

"Is it McPherson or McPhorson?" (McPherson hates it when you pronounce his name mc FEAR son; it's mc FUR son, like the town in Kansas.)

And so began a barrage of very funny questions, all of them rhetoorical to one degree or another ("Why is your hair so nice?") before Kimmel set down the microphone ... and RUSHED out the door trailed by a phalanx of handlers. I was the only journalist actually standing in the back, but even I had no chance to intercept Kimmel.

To watch him run out you'd think he was trying to avoid questions about ... about ...

... um, something.

After Kimmel scooted, McPherson told the room that any plan to bring Leno over to ABC — which makes sense to Nikki and which a couple of in-the-know people assured me is "all but a done deal," with Kimmel's blessing to boot — would have to wait until NBC let Leno loose, an eventuality that McPherson, perhaps protesting too much, called unthinkable.

"I can’t believe that they’re going to let this guy go at the top of his game, and if that happens, I guess we’ll look at it at the time, and Jimmy will be involved in those discussions, and that will be that," McPherson said.

Comments

[Sashacrab]

We've always had the problem with people pronouncing our last name Mc-Fear-son. I don't know how you can get a long "e" out of pher.

-B. McPherson

[Sherrie McPherson Lewis]

I have never liked people pronouncing the name I was born with as the fear sound when it is the fur sound. I dont know where it is definately Mc P -HER son / not Mc P- Hear son.