Congratulations Stephen, You are Known: A Viewer Confessions on the Eve of the Last ‘Late Show With Stephen Colbert’

There used to be a recurring bit on The Late Show where Stephen Colbert would slip into a stained-glass confessional, slide open the little wooden grille, and trade absolutions with whoever was sitting on the other side. It was very Colbert — Catholic in its furniture, mischievous in its theology, and somehow sincere underneath all of it. He could make you laugh at a confession and then, two beats later, make you mean it.

I keep thinking about that booth this week. So with apologies to the host and to whatever saints are still on call at the Ed Sullivan Theater, I have a few things to get off my chest before the lights go down on May 21.

* * *

Confession One: I picked the right one.

I started watching Letterman in 1998. The choice, back then, was binary: Leno or Dave. I went with Dave. I couldn’t have told you exactly why at first — I just knew that one of them made me laugh and the other one made me feel like I was being handled.

It took me a few years to understand the difference. Leno’s jokes never made anyone in the room uncomfortable. They were carefully aimed at no one in particular, which is its own kind of aim. Dave’s punched up — at networks, at executives, at the people who actually had the power to do something about whatever the joke was about — and they punched clumsily sometimes, with a Midwestern moral streak poking through the absurdism. The Tonight Show was for the people who wanted the news softened. The Late Show was for the people who wanted the news looked at. I’d been on the right side of that one all along.

When Dave walked out of the Ed Sullivan Theater in 2015, I felt the grief of someone losing a friend he’d been keeping up with for seventeen years.

* * *

Confession Two: I doubted his successor.

When CBS announced Colbert as Letterman’s heir, I was not ready. I had followed him since the Daily Show desk — the wide-eyed correspondent doing field pieces with a straight face that could crack marble. I had followed him through nine years of The Colbert Report, which was the most committed bit in the history of American television. He stayed in character at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He stayed in character interviewing the man who wrote Master and Commander. He stayed in character through the entire George W. Bush administration. That’s not a job. That’s a vocation.

And the worry, when CBS handed him the Ed Sullivan keys, was that the vocation had eaten the man. That without the pundit costume, there wouldn’t be anyone left to host a chat show. That he’d done the most brilliant character work of his generation and would now have to figure out who he was on national television, in real time, five nights a week.

He allayed all of it within a week. Maybe sooner.

* * *

Confession Three: I was wrong about the Report.

I missed it at first. The first few months of the Late Show, I caught myself waiting for the eyebrow, the lectern lean, the “nation.” It took me a while to understand that the man behind the character had always been the more interesting one — and that the Late Show was the long, generous experiment of finding out who that was.

He built the room itself for the answer. The Ed Sullivan Theater was renovated, not just touched up — the Beaux-Arts ceiling exposed, the proscenium opened up so the band could actually look like a band and not a corner act. He didn’t just walk into Letterman’s house; he renovated it down to the studs while keeping all the load-bearing nostalgia in place. The chair was new. The desk was new. The address was the same. That’s harder than it sounds.

And the band. Jon Batiste and Stay Human — that strange, joyful, melodica-led, second-line-blooded band — arrived as though they had always been the answer to “what should come after Paul Shaffer’s chair?” Not a replacement. A new musical proposition entirely. When Batiste left in 2022, Louis Cato stepped up — Cato, who Colbert once introduced as a musical genius who could “play Mozart on a shoehorn” if you gave him an afternoon. Earlier this year the band got renamed again: Louis Cato and the Great Big Joy Machine. That is, I think, the most Stephen Colbert sentence ever attached to a payroll.

I also learned what kind of colleague he was. When the writers went on strike in 2023, Colbert called four of his competitors — Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers, and John Oliver — and they started a podcast called Strike Force Five. The proceeds went to their out-of-work staffs. The five men who were supposed to be fighting each other for ratings just stopped, and pooled their wattage to take care of the people who made them look good.

You can read the same story in the guest list. The most frequent visitor to Stephen’s Late Show is not a movie star or a politician — it’s John Oliver, who has shown up twenty-one times as a billed guest and another half-dozen as a cameo. Oliver and Colbert never actually overlapped at The Daily Show; they became friends in adjacent studios, two correspondents-turned-hosts who would eventually inherit their own corners of the Stewart universe. Jon Stewart himself kept turning up too — most recently doing a “Late Show Home Shopping” bit on May 1, three weeks before the lights go down. The guest list was also a family tree.

* * *

Confession Four: The interviews are where he showed his hand.

The bits got the clips. The conversations got the souls.

In his third week, in September 2015, Joe Biden sat across from him — still Vice President, still in the long shadow of his son Beau’s death from brain cancer that May. Colbert did not flinch from any of it. He asked about Beau. He asked about faith. He talked, in his own voice, about losing his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was ten. Biden said his sons had honest-to-God raised him, after losing his first wife and daughter in 1972. People still date the beginning of the Late Show — the real Late Show, the one that was going to be his — to that night.

In May 2019, Keanu Reeves came on to promote John Wick: Chapter 3. Toward the end, almost as an aside, Colbert asked him: What do you think happens when we die, Keanu Reeves? Keanu took a long beat, exhaled, and said, “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” Colbert quietly mouthed wow and reached across to shake his hand. It went viral in a way that almost no late-night moment goes viral, because nobody was selling anything in it.

In November 2021, Andrew Garfield came on for tick, tick… Boom!. He had recently lost his mother, Lynn, to pancreatic cancer. Colbert asked the question the way only he asks it — gently, without ornament, with the weight of someone who knows the territory. And Garfield said the thing. “I hope this grief stays with me,” he said, “because it’s all the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell her. And I told her every day.”

In August 2022, Colbert sat with Jon Batiste to say goodbye after seven seasons. There is a particular sweetness to watching one man, on television, tell another that he loves him and is going to miss him and could not be happier for him all in the same breath — and have all three things be obviously true. “As happy as I am for Jon,” he said, “I am thrilled for us.”

You’d be watching a perfectly normal segment and Stephen would, without warning, sing thirty-two bars of Sondheim. Or do an entire bit in the cadence of The Music Man. Or recite Tolkien from memory. Or break into iambic pentameter for no reason except that the iambic pentameter was right there.

None of these moments happened to Colbert. He made them happen. Not by performing depth — by being available to it. There’s a particular thing he does where, if the guest opens a door, he steps through it with them. He doesn’t reach for the next card. He doesn’t pivot to the next bit. He just goes where you go. Most hosts can’t, or won’t.

* * *

Confession Five: The Questionert is the show in miniature.

That Keanu moment didn’t just go viral; it gave Colbert an idea. In January 2021 he launched The Colbert Questionert: fifteen questions, he said, “to cover the full spectrum of human experience,” designed to “penetrate the soul of someone.” Best sandwich? Window or aisle? Apples or oranges? What number am I thinking of? What do you think happens when we die? Describe the rest of your life in five words.

Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep went first. Then dozens of others — Clooney, Streisand, Carol Burnett, Ringo Starr, Cate Blanchett (who lay supine on the desk to do it), Letterman himself, Jon Stewart, John Oliver. And just last week, the first former president to take it: Barack Obama. “I want to warn you,” Colbert told him at the top. “If you answer these questions, you will be fully known.”

The Questionert is the show in miniature. It’s silly and serious and the seam between the two is invisible. You start with the best sandwich and four questions later you’re talking about death. And there is one detail about it that wrecks me, now: Colbert has said he will only take the Questionert himself when he decides to end his time behind the desk. “That’s my tell,” he said. So I am watching, this week, for that.

* * *

Confession Six: The domestic stuff got me, every time.

The segments with his wife, Evie — the two of them reading absurd greeting cards, riffing about their marriage, occasionally just laughing at each other in a way that felt too unguarded to be television — were the most unexpectedly tender thing on the show. They were Colbert’s version of Letterman’s mom: the home life as a recurring guest spot, the proof that the man behind the desk was not, in fact, dispatched in a crate each night and assembled fresh for the next monologue. Dave’s mother was deadpan, Indiana, and immortal. Evie’s appearances were warmer, sillier, more Lowcountry South Carolina. Different temperatures, same project: letting the audience into the kitchen.

* * *

Confession Seven: His classical training kept ambushing me.

You’d be watching a perfectly normal segment and Stephen would, without warning, sing thirty-two bars of Sondheim. Or do an entire bit in the cadence of The Music Man. Or recite Tolkien from memory. Or break into iambic pentameter for no reason except that the iambic pentameter was right there.

There was the night Lin-Manuel Miranda came on and the two of them freestyled together — Colbert keeping up with the kid who wrote Hamilton in his own meter, because of course he could. There was the running joke that he and Hugh Jackman would just spontaneously launch into duets, and you should not bet against either of them on any showtune written before 1985. The Second City years, the theater-kid background, the lifelong love of The Lord of the Rings that he can talk about for two unbroken hours if you let him — none of it was performative. Most late-night hosts have a band; Colbert had an orchestra living somewhere in his chest, and it could be summoned at any moment, on any topic, with no warning.

When John Lithgow came on this past March and recited a poem he’d written for Stephen — calling him a “beloved national treasure,” ending with there’s much more to come from the mighty Colbert — it landed because Lithgow knew exactly what kind of room he was performing in. Eighty years old, reciting verse on a late-night show, to a host who could and would catch every reference. There aren’t many rooms like that left.

* * *

Confession Eight: I do not believe CBS.

I’ll keep this short, but I’ll be damned if I’ll skip it.

The official line is that this is a financial decision. That late night is a difficult business. We are asked to believe that the highest-rated show in its time slot was killed for accounting reasons, in the same year its parent company is trying to close a merger that requires the goodwill of a president the host has spent a decade roasting. We are asked to believe that this is a coincidence.

It is not a coincidence. Colbert himself, at the WGAs a few months back, put it best — said the revolution was going to be televised, but then Paramount bought it. The revolution, he said, was losing forty million dollars a year. It had to go.

It is possible to mourn a show and be furious about how it died at the same time. I am doing both. I will move on now, because Stephen would.

* * *

Confession Nine: I don’t think this is goodbye.

Jon Stewart left and came back. Letterman showed up on Netflix with a beard and the long-form interviews he’d always seemed to want to do. Conan went to a podcast, then to Max, then to the Oscars. The men who built late night have a habit of outliving the format that contained them.

Colbert is sixty-one. His voice has never been sharper. The thing that makes him singular — the curiosity, the language, the willingness to sit with another person’s grief at 11:48 PM — does not require a network, a desk, or a sign-off. It requires a camera and a guest and a few good writers, all of which can be had for considerably less than forty million dollars a year. The Late Show is ending. Stephen Colbert is not.

* * *

A final confession, then I’ll go.

I picked Dave in 1998 and stayed with him until he walked off the stage in 2015. I picked Stephen the night he opened the new theater and stayed with him until — well, until next Thursday, apparently. Two hosts, one chair, almost three decades of watching the same building try to figure out what it wanted to be.

Here’s the thing about endings, and Stephen would know this from his theater days better than I ever will: a curtain coming down on Act Two is not the end of the play. It’s just the part where the lights go out and you wait, in the dark, for the next thing to begin.

I’ll be here.

And when he finally sits down and answers his own fifteen questions — when he tells us, on his last show or the one before, what the best sandwich is and what number he was thinking of all these years — I’ll be watching for that, too. Because that’s his tell. He said so himself.

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Ganpy Nataraj is an entrepreneur, author of “TEXIT – A Star Alone” (thriller) and short stories. He is a moody writer writing “stuff” — Politics, Movies, Music, Sports, Satire, Food, etc.