He played a fake pundit so convincingly it entered the dictionary, then spent a decade proving the real version was worth the 11:35 slot.
At a glance
- Known for
- Host of The Late Show, creator of The Colbert Report
- Before fame
- Sold t-shirts at Second City's box office for free improv classes
- Off-screen
- Co-writing a Lord of the Rings film with his son
Rise to Fame
Eight years as a Daily Show correspondent built the muscle, but the character was always the point. He played a right-wing blowhard so precisely calibrated that actual pundits couldn't always tell if he was mocking them or joining them. Jon Stewart pushed Comedy Central to give him his own show, and the eight-week tryout became a nine-year run.
The pilot coined "truthiness," a word so perfectly aimed that both the American Dialect Society and Merriam-Webster named it Word of the Year. But the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner made it permanent: standing feet from Bush, he delivered a roast the room barely laughed at. The internet watched it 2.7 million times in two days. The gap between the room and the audience was the whole thesis of the character.
In the Spotlight
Nine consecutive seasons as the highest-rated late-night host wasn't enough to save him. CBS pulled The Late Show in July 2025, three days after he called Paramount's $16 million Trump settlement "a big fat bribe" on air. The network called it "purely a financial decision." The show was #1 in its timeslot at the time.
The Writers Guild demanded a bribery investigation. Post-cancellation ratings hit 3 million viewers, his highest weekly numbers since taking over in 2015. The Emmys gave him Outstanding Talk Series two months later, his first win in the category. He's spending his final season doing what he told Spike Jonze was "a late-night comedy show about loss," which is either the saddest or most on-brand thing a comedian can do.
Side Notes
A plane crash in 1974 killed his father and two brothers when he was ten. He's said he picked up a book the day of a funeral and read a new one every day for the next eight years. The books that stuck were Tolkien's, and the faith he found in them, Catholic and unapologetic, never left.
That obsession is paying off in a way nobody predicted. He's co-writing a Lord of the Rings film called Shadow of the Past with his son and screenwriter Philippa Boyens, adapting early Fellowship chapters that Peter Jackson skipped. The lifelong D&D player and Tolkien evangelist is getting the keys to Middle-earth. For a man who processed grief through fantasy literature, it doesn't get more full-circle than that.