The Last Guest on The Colbert Report Proves That Stephen Colbert Is the Best
The final episode of The Colbert Report will air on Comedy Central tonight, marking the end of a more than nine year run, full of song, dance, wørds, interviews and a whole hell of a lot of bald eagles screeching. Oh, and truthiness. Tons of truthiness.
As sad as we are to see “Colbert” go, we are as excited as we could possibly ever be about late night TV (which, medium) at the thought of how good he’ll be when he eventually takes over for David Letterman on Late Night. Actually, scratch that. We’re more than just medium-excited. Why? Well, this week was Colbert’s last week on air, and he could have gotten pretty much any guests he wanted to sit across from him for one of his patented absurdist interviews. And who did he choose to have as his last official human guest (his scheduled last guest tonight is “Grimmy,” the Grim Reaper, who is definitely not human)? Was it Taylor Swift? Was it Lena Dunham? Was it Beyoncé? Was it… we give up, we don’t know any other celebrities? No! It was Phil Klay! Who?
Klay is the recent winner of the National Book Award for his book Redeployment (also one of our favorites of the year) and was, of course, a wonderful guest for Colbert (watch it here), but, you know, he isn’t exactly the flashiest choice. But Colbert doesn’t need to go for flashy—he’s got more than flash; he’s a total badass. You just know that Jimmy Fallon would be bringing out Justin Timberlake, but not Colbert. No, Colbert is too awesome for that, which is why, yes, we’ll miss his arch-conservative dumbass persona, but we have no doubt that whatever he does with his new job—staid as it seems—is undoubtedly going to be great.
Follow Kristin Iversen on twitter @kmiversen