It seems that one of the hardest elements of “The Late Show” getting canceled earlier this year was Stephen Colbert having to tell both his staff and audience the news. According to the CBS host, he not only sweat through his shirt before doing so, but he also had to inform the audience it wasn’t a joke.
Colbert stopped by Jimmy Kimmel’s show on Tuesday night — Kimmel was also the guest on Colbert’s show, as a means of trolling President Trump — and while there, he recounted the story of how he told everyone. According to Colbert, he initially considered waiting until after the summer break to tell his staff.
“And then [my wife] goes, I’m coming to work with you tomorrow, because I think you’re telling your staff tomorrow,” he detailed. “And we get into the building, I go up the elevator, I walk through the offices. By time I get to my offices, I have sweat through my shirt because I didn’t want to know anything my staff didn’t know. And I said, ‘I’m going to tell my staff today.’”
Still, Colbert didn’t want to ruin the taping he was headed into, so he waited until after they’d finished to tell everyone the news.
“I did the whole show, including the cold open on the show. And then when I say goodnight to the audience, I said, ‘OK, now nobody leave because we got one more act of the show!’ because I wanted to go record at the top of the show that we had been, you know, canceled,” Colbert recalled.
“And my stage manager goes, ‘Oh no, we’re done, Steve, we’re done.’ And I said, ‘Nope, there’s one more act of the show. Please don’t let the audience leave,’” he continued. “And he goes, ‘No, boss, I got the thing here, we’ve done everything.’ And I said, ‘I’m aware of that, and I’m here to tell you there’s one more act of the show.’”
From there, Colbert told his staff backstage, before heading back out to tell the audience.
“I was so nervous about doing it right, because there was nothing in the prompter, I was just speaking off the cuff, that I f–ked up twice and had to restart,” Colbert admitted. “And the audience thought it was a bit. And they started going, ‘You can, come on, Steve, you can do it!’ Because I always messed up on the sentence that told them what was happening. And then I got to the sentence that actually told them was happening, and they didn’t laugh.”
You can watch Stephen Colbert’s full appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in the video above.
