Stephen Colbert

Thank you.

Before each show, Stephen Colbert tells his Late Show audience “We don’t do the show for you, we do it with you.” It’s a cue that they’re all in it together, so don’t be stingy with the laughs, but that line also explains why so many mourn right now. It explains the wave of testimonials, the guests, up and down the register of fame, who fought to get on the dwindling number of shows to sing a song or read a poem or engage in whatever other personal incantation allowed them to get closer to whatever they felt a part of.

Colbert created a sense of ownership, not on the level of a few giggles before bedtime or a YouTube sneak at work, but ownership in the deeply felt way people talk about their wedding song or their childhood bedroom.

They feel this because “we do it with you” is a line of theology. Colbert does what all performers do-- thinks about what connects his work to the humans receiving it. But he goes further. He agonizes about what connects us as humans, what lifts us up, where the lines are between sentimentality and pathos, humor and cynicism, who deserves grace, who deserves a knee to the groin with a smile.

Colbert attends. He has long attended, which, when done with intention becomes an act of devotion.¹

Wait, these are just jokes. Correct. Jokes, but not just jokes. Listen to Colbert talk about what should or should not go into a monologue and you’ll hear an entire worldview built over a lifetime. Quick to laugh. Quick to tears. Same porousness. Grief has sharpened his sense of joy. Beauty lands harder when you know how temporary everything is.

Gratitude is the sentiment Colbert viewers express the most. They can’t find the words exactly, so they produce them in rapid succession, the way holiday travelers trying to capture their feeling about the Acropolis take 87 photographs. None quite captures the thing, but the tonnage of snaps testifies to the depth of feeling.

For some, the gratitude has to do with politics, but that’s not the main thing. Watching someone attend on your behalf-- which is what a Late Show audience experiences-- creates gratitude, because the audience can feel how far back that work on their behalf has gone. This is how a person being looked at on a stage can make the audience feel like the one being seen. They leave the seats feeling like Colbert knows something about them. About love, vanity, fear, loneliness, aspiration. People see in bright lights what they had previously only felt in their bones.

To watch someone take that much care is inspiring. The Late Show crew feels it. A picture from last week at the crew party on the roof shows Colbert up on some tower talking to his staff. It looks like he’s rallying troops before a battle where they are outnumbered. The picture captures a final moment-- in the future they’ll be lost, scattered-- but it also captures the spirit of the 11 years that came before. Late Show staff don’t talk about their jobs like they’re members of a crew, but more like they’ve enlisted in a corps. Same throughline with the audience: they feel part of something.

The atmosphere around a leader reveals the leader. We know what that looks like when the leader is a monstrous baby whom none dare gainsay.² On the other end of the spectrum are leaders who steer by fixed points-- — Evie, the kids, the faith that preceded the fame —who know where they begin and end and who inspire you to be your best self both because they demand the same of themselves, but also because they convince you-- even when you’re not certain-- that what’s being asked of you is within your power. (Guests feel it too — Colbert’s curiosity makes them want to be worth it.³)

Every night before he walks onstage, Colbert slaps himself in the face hard enough to regret it, so he won’t take the next hour for granted.

Work that is hard but reveals people to themselves is rare. How lucky to be asked to do the most that you can do. You can see it in the Late Show crew from the curb where they greet guests, threaded through the theater’s byzantine staircases, to the chair on stage, to the band and back again. You can see why. “If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve your money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself. And you will have only yourself.”⁴

A lot of the crew can legitimately call their boss their friend. In showbusiness this can be a nearly meaningless word, but in this case has almost a ferocity to it. Even when the odds are against the moment, Colbert’s friendship has the energy of the line, “we are horribly afraid but we are coming with you.”⁵

Much of what has been written about the end of The Late Show has focused on how it ended. This invites a catalogue of what won’t come to an end. There are scores of people whose sense of humor, curiosity, honor and care has been drawn out of them by Colbert. That’s now all a part of their lives, their future wedding toasts, their jokes at work.

Over the years, when tragedy hit—a school shooting, an attack on the U.S. Capitol, some fresh injury to their faith in the country—people felt steadied at 11:35. They heard their fears, grief, bewilderment and convictions reflected back to them with clarity, humor and care. And there are those who take comfort at moments of intense pain from having heard Stephen talk about loss: “It’s a gift to exist,” he told Anderson Cooper in a conversation about grief, “and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escape from that. But if you are grateful for your life, then you have to be grateful for all of it.”

The tail of YouTube is long and so are the memories of all those people whose request for a selfie he treated like it was a gift to him, or whose breakups, funerals, lonely apartments and late-night drives were softened by the strange comfort of hearing someone else attend carefully to the world.⁶

That’s a legacy, but it’s also a model, a reminder to seek out cheer and song, to be curious, attentive and true. Available to all of us lucky enough to be in the audience.

1. After Simone Weil..

2. Robert Bolt, from the introduction to A Man for All Seasons.

3. Hi Mom.

4. Northwestern Commencement 2011.

5. Merry to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring

6. Colbert: “You can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time—of anything. If you’re laughing, I defy you to be afraid.”