Watch Jimmy Kimmel Get a Colonoscopy — with Katie Couric by His Side
Since hitting the half-century mark this past fall, Jimmy Kimmel is taking doctor’s recommendations and getting a colonoscopy — but he isn’t doing it alone.
On Tuesday evening’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel, who turned 50 in November — the age that the American Cancer Society recommends men and women begin getting tested for colorectal cancer — prepares for a colonoscopy with Katie Couric by his side, and PEOPLE has an exclusive sneak peek!
“So we’re going to take a careful look in your colon today and the goal is to identify polyps. So if we see any polyps, we’ll remove them,” Dr. Christina Ha tells Kimmel at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
“And then I can have it?” says Kimmel, who lays in the hospital bed sporting a hospital gown. “Whatever is in there, I need. I want all the pieces. I want this to be like an Ikea bookshelf where you’re like, ‘Why are these screws left over?’ ”
Couric, 61, says that Kimmel, “wants to put it on his desk.”
“Well, what we’ll do is we’ll take plenty of pictures,” Dr. Ha tells him.
When Couric asks why more people don’t get screened, Kimmel interjects and quips, “Because they go up your ass! That’s why.”
“I’m telling ya, I’ve met some real perverts in my life, but you take the cake, Katie Couric. This is a very unusual sexual thing,” he says to Couric, who assures him, “It’s not sexual.”
WATCH: Jimmy Kimmel Gets a Colonoscopy
Though Kimmel’s appointment was filled with laughter, the reality of colon cancer is deeply personal to Couric, whose husband Jay Monahan died of the disease 20 years ago. March is also Colon Cancer Awareness Month.
“I hope he would think that the work that I’m doing – whether it’s in colon cancers or in other cancers, to save future Jay Monahans from experiencing the same fate that he did – is worthwhile and important,” Couric (the co-founder of Stand Up 2 Cancer, the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance and the Jay Monahan Center for Gastrointestinal Health) told PEOPLE in March 2015.
“I think he would be pissed that some of the treatments that are available now and some of the awareness that exists now was not around in 1997 when he was diagnosed,” she added. “I think he’d be just really disappointed that he missed out on so much, to be honest with you.”
At the end of January, Couric celebrated the life of her late husband with a commemorative Instagram post.
“Jay Monahan. January 9, 1956-January 24, 1998,” she captioned a photo of Monahan posing with one of their two daughters, Ellie, now 26, and Caroline, 22. “Twenty years ago today. We miss you.”
Jimmy Kimmel Live! airs weeknights (11:35 p.m. ET) on ABC.
