Next week, for the first time in over a year, Stephen Colbert will be taping “The Late Show” in front of a live audience again.
TERRY GROSS: One of the things that’s kept me sane this past year is ending nearly every weekday by watching “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” The most troubling things related to COVID and politics are typically what he focuses on in his monologues.
And I always wondered, like, how do you find time to spend with your wife and children? But for several months, you were spending all your time at home, where your wife and two of your sons were.
Like, you read a kind of corny greeting card for the holiday, and then you read a really funny version of what the first draft might have sounded like, which is always kind of nasty and more honest.
STEPHEN COLBERT: As always, when doing the first drafts for Mother’s Day, I need a mom volunteer from the audience to come up and help me out.
As hard as the COVID restrictions have been and the anxiety and the shock about how much it’s spread in the United States, we’ve got to spend a lot of time with the people we love – with our family.
I remember her coming over and going – because – is there any way you could be a little quieter? I’m like, no.
But to have them intimately involved, like my eldest of my two boys – my elder of my two boys, he was there, like, every day running everything, like, the sound, the cameras, the lights, the satellite connection, the switching, all of the switching that we needed to do for the virtual control room.
COLBERT: So then Evie took over.
And it’s certainly – having somebody in the room with you while you’re creating a show, especially a show under these conditions, where – it’s not a natural way to do one of these shows.
COLBERT: I’m much more likely to mess up and have to retake something, lose the rhythm of a joke, or even just misread the prompter without an audience there because there’s some vital performance adrenaline spark that’s missing that the audience provides.
And I remember thinking, God, if – I wish I could just find a way to do material that Evie would laugh at or that if I could make an audience laugh the way I can make Evie laugh, it gives me enormous joy when I hear her laugh.
GROSS: How have all the changes of the pandemic and the constant concerns about protecting yourself and your family from getting the virus – how has that affected your mood? I know you’re vaccinated now, so I’m hoping Evie is, too and that, you know, the concern about that has hopefully diminished a little bit.
They – others come in at staggered intervals throughout the day – come in to this little storage closet where we do the show.
But I – you know, I really want to do the show we’re about to do, and I also really don’t want to do the show we want to do because Lord have mercy.
For years now, people have been telling you cowards that if you let the president lie about our democracy over and over and then join him in that lie and say he’s right when you know for a fact that he is not, there will be a terrible price to pay.
I had the TV on in the background just to keep track of what was happening after that rally they’d had that morning in The Ellipse there.
And by the time I got into the city, and we saw the enormity of it, my showrunner, Chris Licht said, I think this is a live show.
I mean, one of the challenges with a kind of a low-key, competent administration is it makes you think that things are normal – and I guess they’ve always been normal – when, in fact, it’s so easy to forget how much relief we are experiencing just to have a non-poisonous stream of information or lies coming at us constantly.
So I think at the time, he was maybe still considering a possible run in 2016 when you interviewed him, but if he was considering it, he hadn’t announced yet.
And just to set it up, you know, you were talking to him about the losses in his life, his son Beau, who had recently died, earlier in his life when his wife and his daughter were killed in a car crash, and his sons were hospitalized, and his whole life was turned upside down.
Your mom, your family, losing your dad when you were a kid and three brothers, I mean, you know, it’s just – it’s like asking what made your mother do it every day? How did she get up every single day with, you know, 11 kids and stuff? I mean, it’s just…
You had – you shared this, like, really – you seemed to, like, really connect in that moment, both talking about your losses and how you admired each other for being able to carry on.
When he looked like he might be running for president, Jon Stewart, this past time – Jon Stewart came on and we do this things where we flip every so often and have the guests interview me.
And I said, and after Joe Biden came on, I – he walked off stage and I said to my executive producer, Tom Purcell, I said, I think that nice old man just gave me my show.
And so he – I got the call and I put him on speaker and he goes, listen, buddy, if you ever call me a nice old man again, I’m going to come down there and personally kick your ass.
He begins taping “The Late Show” in front of a live audience on Monday after over a year of COVID-restricted broadcasts from home.
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