Stephen Colbert’s final episode as host of The Late Show brought an end to the long-running CBS late night franchise and placed a cap on 11 years of comedic takes on current events.
While Colbert famously struggled in his first few months after taking over the series from David Letterman, he hit his stride around the time of the 2016 political conventions and later provided sharp comedic commentary on the first Trump administration with the show soaringto become the most watched show in late-night TV starting in 2017.
But Colbert didn’t delight in his success amid that political climate.
“I would trade good ratings for a better president,” Colbert told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “We were ready for something that galvanized people’s attention and changed their priorities. The thank-you note is to my staff for being ready — that’s the thank-you note. Because if it’s not Donald Trump, it’s something else. There will be something else that we care about, hopefully happy, possibly tragic. But we’re ready to talk about what just happened, whenever it happens now. And that’s what we’ve learned.”
He guided viewers through the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, shifting alongside his audience to working from home, and shared raw, emotional reactions to President Trump challenging the results of the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, going live at the end of the historic day in 2021.
Through it all, Colbert sat down for memorable interviews with such figures as Christopher Nolan, Keanu Reeves, Barack and Michelle Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2015 just as his Late Show was getting started.
Looking back at his Late Show legacy, Colbert recently told THR in an exit interview cover story, “I want to be remembered as a comedy show. We harvest laughter for a living, and ultimately that’s the thing I want more than anything else. I just want to make the audience laugh.”
And he’s continued to minimize his political impact from his decades in late night, first with The Daily Show, then The Colbert Report and now The Late Show.
“We’re not changing the damn world,” he said. “Have you seen the world? I promise you, if you think that I’m on some kind of agenda, then I’m really shitty at it because nothing has gone in the direction that I had hoped. I mean, nothing for 25 years.”
In honor of Colbert’s final bow, take a look back at the most memorable moments from his Late Show tenure, presented in chronological order.
Just three days into Colbert’s then-rocky tenure as Late Show host, he interviewed then-Vice President Joe Biden in a moving two-part discussion about loss (Biden’s son Beau had recently died and Colbert’s father and two brothers famously died in a plane crash in 1974), grief and faith. The sit-down helped Colbert, still trying to adjust to hosting a show as himself after nine years of playing a self-proclaimed “high-class idiot” on The Colbert Report, recognize that he could have memorable conversations as himself. After the interview was over, Colbert, as he’s recalled multiple times since including to Jon Stewart in one of the latter’s many appearances on The Late Show (see below), told his executive producer Tom Purcell, “that nice old man just gave me my show.”
“And what I meant was how you actually talked to someone as myself, because what he was sharing with me in that moment was so intimate and speaking so specifically to my own experience that the only way to receive it was really as the real me,” Colbert told NPR in 2021.
He told CBS News’ John Dickerson in 2015, “It was one of … the most sublime moments I’ve ever had onstage, was to be there and have the ability, or to have the responsibility and the privilege to receive that from him.”
