Apparently, Jimmy Kimmel (and all Oscars hosts) aren’t paid all that much

If you’re hosting the Academy Awards, you’re clearly doing it for the honor and the prestige — and absolutely not for the money.

Speaking in a new interview on The Kevin & Bean Show on local Los Angeles station KROQ (per The Hollywood Reporter), Jimmy Kimmel made it clear that as Oscars host, he is only going to get the sum of $15,000. While for many professions that could be considered a hefty paycheck, but just remember that for an episode of “The Big Bang Theory,” Jim Parsons makes roughly a million bucks. Meanwhile, Hugh Laurie near the end of “House” was getting well over half a million himself. Compared to some of these monster salaries, all of a sudden Kimmel’s earnings seem small in comparison.

Ultimately, Kimmel speculated on the show that they may pay hosts a little bit more who come back to host a second or third time, and then joked that he may not have been supposed to figure the jury away before saying that it was “their fault” for saying that he wasn’t supposed to.

We should say that we are in some ways both surprised and not surprised to hear this news, given that there is probably not much of a need to pay people some extreme amount of money to come and do a gig that they would have no problem doing for almost nothing. While this is a very intimidating gig for many people out there, we don’t exactly think that Jimmy himself is going to have an enormous amount of pressure on him. He’s hosted the Emmys before, he interviews movie stars all the time, and he’s not going to be out to prove much of anything.

Kimmel also claimed that he would “figure something out” with ABC about the annual aftershow that airs after the Oscars. It’s certainly possible that the whole thing could be recorded in advance, or he could just literally run across the street if they wanted to do something partly live. (“Jimmy Kimmel Live” is right across the straight from the Dolby Theater.)