Obama’s joke-fest with Jimmy Kimmel: UFOs, Clinton email and ‘Fast Times’

Late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel had a request for President Obama during an appearance Thursday on Kimmel’s television show: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new email address.

“I can’t share it with you,” Obama joked. “I don’t think she’d want you to have it, frankly.”

The banter over the political morass in which Clinton finds herself for using private email during her tenure as secretary of State was part of a lighthearted conversation with Kimmel on a presidential visit that also included a sober denunciation of the violence that has erupted in Ferguson, Mo. (Later, Obama traveled to Santa Monica for a Democratic Party fundraiser.)

Kimmel, who introduced his guest as the first “Kenyan-born Muslim socialist” president, wanted to know whether Obama had tried to get to the bottom of the “UFO files” about the mysterious desert region known as Area 51.

“The aliens won’t let it happen,” Obama joked. “You’d reveal all their secrets. They exercise strict control over us.”

But President Clinton once said he’d checked on the matter and found nothing, Kimmel protested.

“That’s what we’re instructed to say,” Obama responded.

Next came the question of whether the president can run down to the White House kitchen in his underpants in the middle of the night if he gets hungry.

“I could,” Obama deadpanned. “I don’t.”

The president gamely read a handful of mean tweets about himself from Twitter -- a staple segment for celebrities on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

“How do you make Obama’s eyes light up? Shine a flashlight in his ears,” the president read.

And he joked about meeting backstage with actor Sean Penn, another guest on the show. Kimmel wanted to know whether the president had seen the 1982 film “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” in which Penn played a young stoner surfer.

Obama called the film “a classic.”

“I lived it, man,” he said. “I didn’t just see it.”

Twitter: @finneganLAT