Trivia / The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

• Actor-Shared Background: Laura Benanti, who plays the Slovenian-American Melania Trump, also has ancestry from a Balkan country, Serbian in her case.^note In fact, her birth name is Vidnovic.
• Channel Hop: A temporary example - the 2016 and 2020 Election Day episodes aired on Showtime to allow for live, uncensored sketches and jokes.
• Corpsing:
  • Stephen cracks up during a monologue when the headline catches him off-guard.
  • Stephen simply can't contain himself against Laura Benanti's Melania Trump impression.
• Creator Backlash: After a few years, Colbert admitted he thought his first six months on the show were "terrible," as he struggled to fine-tune performing as himself rather than a character, and how much political material to include.
• Defictionalization: In a way. A greeting card pack in the style of the "First Drafts" segment was made available for sale in February 2023. There are six pairs of cards, each for different holidays, with one card being normal and the other being a silly "first draft".
• #EngineeredHashtag: #HeWhoShallBeNamed, which Stephen uses to collect funny nicknames for Donald Trump.
• Executive Meddling:
  • On the May 17, 2016 episode, Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara appeared together to promote Schitt's Creek. Colbert said that every time the name of the show was spoken, a Commercial Pop-Up ("Schitt's Creek: Wednesdays on Pop") was required to be shown on-screen, just to show that they weren't getting away with uncensored swearing. The three of them proceeded to say the title as often as possible.
  • In a very similar example, when the President referred to Adam Schiff as Adam Schitt in a tweet, Stephen was required by CBS to only say the word when the actual tweet was onscreen. Stephen then took full advantage of this by having only the single word from the tweet onscreen and then making shit jokes for a minute and a half.
  • While making jokes about a newly-discovered frog sex position, the show displayed a picture taken from a peer-reviewed scientific journal that depicted frogs having sex. Despite the fact that the picture was an academic drawing that depicted no genitalia, CBS censors required a black bar to be placed on the image (CBS's lawyer told the show that "animals don't fuck" on the network). Colbert later got back at the censors by showing how he can display the uncensored image simply by labeling it a picture of two frogs tandem skydiving.
  • After Stephen briefly resurrected his old "Stephen Colbert" persona , lawyers from Comedy Central contacted CBS saying that the former owned the rights to that character and all associated segments. Stephen conceded that he had to permanently retire the character but then introduced the world to "Stephen Colbert" the Report host's identical twin cousin and presented a segment called "The Werd". "Stephen Colbert's identical twin cousin, Stephen Colbert" went on to make several appearances in the proceeding months, always with a line specifying that he was not the character from The Colbert Report, but taking on more and more of his persona while explicitly referencing things about that character. Eventually, in April 2017, the original "Stephen Colbert" character was quietly reinstated, simply introduced by Stephen as "conservative pundit Stephen Colbert" with no distinction from the Colbert Report character. As of late-2019 this issue is likely moot, given that Comedy Central's parent company Viacom re-merged with CBS.
• I Am Not Spock: Colbert has made it very clear that he is distancing himself from the "Stephen Colbert" character on The Late Show.^note This most likely explains why he doesn't pronounce the 'T' in Colbert, despite no longer playing the character from the Report. He started doing that to distinguish "Stephen Colbert" from The Colbert Report from the real Stephen Colbert, who does pronounce the 'T' in Colbert.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: After Stephen swore to never mention Donald Trump's name again (on his monologue, at least) after Trump claimed without proof to have won the 2020 presidential election before the vote count had ended, he started to come off with names for Trump (mainly "the President"), but after his presidency ended in January 2021, Stephen started asking fans of the show on Twitter to help him by giving him nicknames for Trump to use under the hashtag #HeWhoShallBeNamed.
• The Other Darrin: For "Twas the Coup Before Christmas", Jeff Bergman reprised his role from Our Cartoon President as Donald Trump, whereas the last two specials had Colbert himself voicing the ex-President.
• Production Posse: Whither Colbert goeth, Stewart will not be far behind; Jon Stewart is an executive producer on this show. You just can't keep them apart! Additionally, pretty much all of the writing and production staff — including, very importantly, Jim "Jimmy" Hoskinson — from the Report moved to this show with Stephen. In a major coup, he also hired writer Brian Stack away from Conan O'Brien. Another alumnus from one of Colbert's Comedy Central shows, Paul Dinello (Strangers with Candy), serves as a writer and producer on the show.
• Real-Life Relative: Stephen's wife, Evie, became an integral part of the show during their 15 months in quarantine, serving as both producer and audience as they broadcast the show from home. She quickly became an enormous Ensemble Dark Horse and now makes regular appearances on the show in the post-quarantine era, even though beforehand she had very rarely appeared in person.
• Real Song Theme Tune: The theme that accompanies the "[X] Slam!" gag that appeared in 2020 is the riff of "Groove Is in the Heart" by Deee-Lite.
• Role Reprise: Jeff Bergman voiced both Donald Trump and Joe Biden in "Twas the Coup Before Christmas", returning from Our Cartoon President.
• Throw It In!: When shooting the bungee jumping sequence in New Zealand, Stephen came up with the idea to have a shooting double do a jump from a distance to wring some extra laughs out of his genuine fear of heights. He asked producer Chris Licht to be the double and Licht immediately agreed, leading to the crew hastily throwing together an identical outfit and spray-painting Licht's hair so he could better resemble Stephen.
• Troubled Production: The latter half of 2023 was marked by a string of awful luck for the man. First, like all the late night shows, he was out of commission for several months during the summer as a result of the combined SAG and WGA strikes. Not too long after the strikes ended and he resumed work in October, he was stricken with another bout of COVID-19 and had to host from his home in quarantine, and not too long after that, right before Thanksgiving at the end of November, bad luck struck again after a ruptured appendix left him out entirely for roughly another month. Plans to secure him in bubble-wrap are currently in development.
• What Could Have Been: Colbert's team had created a "cartoon" version of Anthony Scaramucci and were ready to debut him on July 31, 2017 - the same day Scaramucci was fired as White House Communications Director.