Jimmy Kimmel struggled to hold back sobs as he paid tribute to comedian and friend Bob Saget.
The Full House star died on Sunday (9 January) aged 65 at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Orlando, Florida. No cause of death was given.
Hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live without a studio audience on Monday (10 January) night, Kimmel remembered Saget as “the sweetest man”.
“He’d write sometimes just to tell me he loved me and I know he did that for many people,” he said.
Kimmel said that he had reread their old email exchanges following the news of Saget’s death, explaining: “Some of them were just funny and some of them were very serious emails about life and the wellbeing of our children and how hard it is to appreciate one of those without the other being just right.
“In one email we’re talking about our kids – I have it here – he wrote, ‘One night soon, let’s go around and have some meat and some good damn drinks and talk about how lucky we are that we have them.’ We did do that many times.’
Kimmel then sent messages of love to Saget’s family and friends, before recalling how he, Saget and John Stamos had paid tribute to the comedian Don Rickles on TV following his death in 2017.
“We never imagined that four and a half years later, we’d be talking about –” Kimmel said, before getting choked up and explaining that he’d taped this speech “about 14 times”.
Following Saget’s death, his daughter Aubrey shared one of the last texts she had received from her father in the hours before he died.
