How Sarah Silverman kept her Matt Damon viral video a secret from Jimmy Kimmel

It’s been 17 years since we all learned a little too much about Sarah Silverman’s love life.

On Jan. 31, 2008, Silverman surprised her then boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel with a gag video, revealing that she was involved in an affair with Matt Damon. The resulting clip turned into an early YouTube sensation, and added tankers-worth of fuel to the ongoing phony Damon-Kimmel feud.

Silverman, who has a new Netflix special out now called PostMortem, stopped by Ted Danson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast and recalled how the video came together.

The initial idea, Silverman said, came from “two writers on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Tony Barbieri and Sal Iacono, Jimmy’s cousin Sal. I was on tour, and I was going through Miami, and that’s where Matt Damon was living at that time. So we planned to do something when I was there.”

She continued, “[Jimmy and I] were a couple, and I remember I had to lie to him about where I was on tour, and I’m not good at that at all. I was just like, ‘Commit to this.’ The night before, we got together, and we wrote the song in a studio and recorded it. We wrote the song, like, in a fury, and one of the guys did Matt’s voice. Then we had three hours at this hotel the next morning, and Matt had also given us three hours because he had a hard out at noon, because his daughter had a Halloween pageant.”

Danson, who admitted he had missed the phenomenon when it first happened, asked a bit about the lore of the Damon-Kimmel feud, a running gag that has gone on to involve Ben Affleck, Jimmy Fallon, Justin Timberlake, and schtick at the Oscars ceremony and the World Series.

Silverman explained how early on Kimmel had trouble securing guests.

“I remember his second guest was a man with the longest arm hair. Like, it was really slim pickings. He couldn’t get anyone. And I said, ‘You should, say, take the biggest movie star, you know, Matt Damon. Say, ‘Sorry, Matt Damon, we ran out of time’ at the end of the show. And then he started doing that. And then when Matt started engaging in it, he was like, ‘I wanna do this, but don’t ever stop doing it.’ And I think he still to this day says, ‘Sorry, Matt Damon, ran out of time.'”

Getting back to the shooting of the video, Silverman explained, “[Damon] came in and learned it in a closet in one of the hotel rooms, recorded his part, and then we just played the audio and lip-synced it. And we had four different locations, and it was just, like, run and gun. And it came out so great.”

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Kimmel, meanwhile, knew nothing about it, and didn’t know what he was going to see when Silverman rolled the clip on the show.

“I think he acted mad because he felt like he needed to,” she said. “But he loved it. And I remember we were brushing our teeth before the show, you know, like, in his dressing room, and he goes, ‘Everyone says this video is great.’ And I go, ‘Keep your expectations low. It’s just a funny video.’ But it really was kind of one of the first viral videos, and it’s so funny because after that, people would try to hire me to make a viral video, and I was like, ‘Everyone wants to make a viral video. That’s everyone’s intention, I’m sure, but that’s not something you can make.'”

Silverman also said that she had rewatched the clip for the first time in a while about a year ago. “I was like, ‘This actually holds up. So much of my comedy, and comedy in general, is just not evergreen. But that one felt pretty evergreen.”

You can hear Silverman’s full chat with Danson below.