Stephen Colbert on returning to ‘The Late Show’ theater: ‘I couldn’t remember how you started a show’
Stephen Colbert always seems unflappable. Cool as a cucumber. But when he was flummoxed when he stepped on stage in front of an audience at the Ed Sullivan Theater to do CBS “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” after more than aa year. “I couldn’t remember how you started a show,’ he admitted in a recent Variety Zoom conversation. During the height of the Pandemic, Colbert first did “Late Show” from a room in his house and then in a small office at the Ed Sullivan building.
“I honestly couldn’t remember, like, how do you go out there and say ‘hi’ to the audience again? I was really happy to see them. But I just couldn’t remember.” He was also nervous because of his pre-show ritual where he goes on stage tells the audience four jokes. “I know what those four jokes get,” he explained. “It gives me a sense of who the audience is. You know what I mean? It’s like dipping litmus paper and going what’s the pH balance of this audience? How much do I have to work? I couldn’t remember any of them when I got up there. It was like strangely, incredibly familiar, and incredibly foreign at the same time. It took me a while to sort of get back on my feet.”
Colbert won’t reveal the four questions, for the simple reason he would have to write new ones because the surprise element would be missing. “It’s all about saying hello,” he say. “They’re all hello jokes about where they are in the building, how the room is set up, stuff like that. It’s to see whether they’ve settled into the space. But I can’t tell you.”
Because the audience wears masks, Colbert initially thought he wouldn’t be able to hear them laugh. (Colbert is also deaf in his right ear.) “I was afraid they’d be under a wet blanket, but they’re present. They don’t complain about the masks. I don’t see the masks after a while.”
The audiences in general have calmed down since Donald Trump left office. “Since the end of the administration, things don’t change as quickly,” Colbert explains. “It isn’t everything gets thrown out at 4:30 p.m. and we have to rewrite the show or there aren’t 12 news cycles between breakfast and dinner. I think they’re a happier house than they used to be and also grateful that we can be back together.”
Colbert is always in the writers’ pitch meetings in the morning. “They’ll pitch three or four stories or three or four takes on a single story” he noted. “Some are more fully fleshed out, some are just conceptual, and we’ll take 15 or 20 minutes about where to swing. I really like my writers’ room. I’m really happy that it’s much more diverse than it used to be. I think you’re going to get a better perspective. Nobody’s exactly like anyone else, but the more diverse your room is, the more diverse takes you get and the more options you have to amplify ideas surprises you.”
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