Don't have this on your playlist? Let's change that! Discover the breathtaking landscapes of Japan in Forza Horizon 6. Experience stunning contrasts of rural and urban in this open-world driving adventure. Explore diverse biomes and beautiful landscapes in over 550 real-world cars. Your journey to becoming a Horizon legend starts now! Play Forza Horizon 6 Premium Edition on Xbox and PC. Japan awaits! Music Sit down! You gotta go! Sit down! Thank you very much! Thank you! Please! Thank you! Thank you, Paul! Sit down! Music Sit the f*** down! Welcome to the Late Show! I'm your host, Stephen Colbert, and this is... Music This is the final week of our show. There's so many important things going on in the world, but a lot of that stuff's a drag. So I'm just gonna... Sigh Go over here. Because here's the deal. This one? We thought we might just take it a little easy tonight. Because we've been doing this show for almost 11 years. Almost 1,800 shows at this point. More than 18 shows at this point. More than 18 shows at this point. And we definitely have enough material for a best of clip show, but y'all got YouTube, you do it. We thought... This is just us thinking. This is how we think. We thought it'd be more fun to show you stuff we've made but never aired and call it the worst of the Late Show. Though technically what you're about to see is still the best worst stuff we ever made. Still, not great. And we have the perfect live audience for it. The people who made it, that's right. Everyone in this theater works on my staff. Say hi everybody. There you go. And I want to assure you they are not, they're not clapping for me because I pay them. Because soon I will not. For all the viewers at home, this is how we rehearse the show every day. I get on stage in the suit, in the makeup, and my staff watches me do jokes. Sometimes they laugh, they give me their feedback, and as a special treat, I let them watch me eat steamed chicken. Woo! Yeah! There we go. There we go. There we go. There we go. There we go. What do we got? What do we got today? Oh, it's steamed chicken. There we go. Lewis. Come on man, you in? You in? It's a tradition. Lewis always comes over and takes one piece of the steamed chicken. Never the largest piece because that's the kind of guy he is. Thank you very much. That one slice of chicken is union mandated. So why do we have all this stuff that never made it to air? A lot of reasons. For one, sometimes the world just doesn't cooperate. Like during the 2016 presidential election, we were doing a live special on Showtime, and no commercial breaks. And as the results started to come in, it became clear that we had planned for a different outcome. We were so sure that the New York Times' prediction needle was right. We hired a bunch of naked male models with the words, I'm with her, painted on their full plump butts. Sadly, all of those models had to be put down. But first, we tried to save the bit. And as the outcome became clear, we repainted their butts to say, we're ****. And between those two butt bits, this is totally true. Our co-executator producer Matt Lapham was backstage screaming into his headset, scrub the butts. Right, Matt? Is that right? That's right. It was more like, scrub the butts, scrub the butts. That night, even the butts cried. Oh, if you knew Matt, you knew how important it was to him to get in one more a** joke. And that's the cleanest it's ever been. Hard to believe, but some stuff we made is the worst without having anything to do with politics. In 2023, we produced a Thanksgiving sketch that I was pitched and agreed to, although I have no memory of doing that, for a product called erotic body gravy. It's to be used for post Thanksgiving dinner sex. But when I watched it, I said, those actors are way too attractive for comedy. You guys ended up just making soft-core gravy porn. That's as much as if you're ever going to want to see, I promise you. To make matters worse, the day they played this commercial for me was just a couple of days before Thanksgiving. And they played it in rehearsal. And unbeknownst to me at the time or anyone else, my appendix had already burst before rehearsal and was leaking poisonous bile into my abdominal cavity. Here's my actual reaction that day to screening the erotic body gravy sketch in rehearsal. From the makers of small gourds with flared bases, you know what to do. Wow. It's hard to tell, but my pants, my fly is open because I'm in so much pain. We found out later at that point I was producing my own body gravy. In the summer of 2015, I had this idea to interview like really wonky guests before the show came off. I'd like to do wonky stuff, but let's keep it interesting. And I would interview them on the Nitro Rollercoaster at Six Flags Great America. We showed some of these interviews, like my interview with Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. Some of the others made it to air, but we never showed you the one where I spoke with constitutional scholar Zephyr Teachout until now. I thought the Constitution was a perfect document. I mean, it's written for us. It's written for, say the first three words with me. How is the Constitution being misapplied? Well, right now the modern court has in a series of decisions, Moccalee versus Malaio and Citizens United, basically undermining our entire democracy by refusing to allow Congress and state governments to fight against corruption. We, uh, thank you Zephyr. We eventually stopped doing that segment because shortly after the news itself was enough to make me puke. We've got a lot more never-before-seen stuff for you tonight, so stick around for more of the best of the worst of the late show. And if you see anything you don't like, it's their fault. Are you all at Campaign's lighting of the dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bulk spend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. My boss asked for results, so we opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions. Cut the bull spend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend £200 on your first campaign to get a £200 credit. Go to linkedin.com.com. Slate. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. Hi again. Hey, what's up, mate? Hey, guys. We've done so many amazing field pieces on the show over the years. I've gone to Russia to find the truth behind the steel dossier, to New Zealand to hang out with Jacinda Ardern and Greenland to visit the brave men and women of the space force and most harrowing of all, a New York souvenir shop with Robert De Niro. But we've also done field pieces that didn't get on for a variety of reasons, ranging from I wasn't sure if America would like them to I was sure America wouldn't like them. For instance, one of our favorite friends of the show is Bootsy Plunkett. She's the mother of my producer, Jake Plunkett. Bootsy went into the world as what we called our uninformed correspondent and she made some really uninformative field pieces. But what you haven't seen are the times that you haven't seen her. We've never aired a piece, for instance, where Bootsy sat down with Paul Krugman to talk about inflation. Also never showed one where she went to a movie premiere to rub elbows with celebrities and one where she interviewed former DNC chair Tom Perez about healthcare inside a completely dark haunted house, which you'll be able to see because we filmed it with night vision cameras. My daughter has pre-existing conditions. Oh my God! God bless her. Sadly, now the show is ending, Jake's going to have to torture his mom for free. So we also sent our writers on a variety of fools errands that we never broadcast like in 2018 when our then writer Emmy Blotnik attended a protest against Donald Trump led by Pugs and she asked the tough questions. What do you think Trump sounds like when he has sex? Oh wow! Wow. That beat worked. But we thought we probably need more than one beat for a field piece. We also sent our writer and late show certified young person, Eliana Cortler, to a 90s themed convention in Hartford, Connecticut. She got to dress up and then she got slimed. The piece was shot and fully edited and was slated to air. Hi Eliana. It was slated to air but we never did because at the last minute we realized it was not good. Lastly, in 2024 we went to Chicago for the DNC. Had an amazing visit. Wonderful town. Love those people. But we ran out of time to show everything we shot there. For instance, a piece where I spent a long grueling day hanging out and drinking with my best friend and worst co-worker, Paul Dinello. Is he here? Is he here? Of course he is. Damn it. Damn it. Love you. Best man I know. Wonderful person. I didn't know. I didn't know people were going to be in today. Wow. I'm going to show you a rough cut of the piece now because I don't feel like talking no more. You should know it still has the scratch track of my producer Gabe Gronley's voiceover because I never recorded mine. And I'm going to go get some Welch's fruit snacks. Roll it. It was great to be back in Chicago, the windy city, the city of big shoulders, the city that acts like it's normal to spend a decade studying improv. I had a free afternoon so I headed to Old Town and stopped by one of my first departments. Here it is. You know who else lived in this building? My old buddy Paul Dinello from Strangers with Candy and Eggs 57. And we wrote together for many years and he was actually the best man in my wedding. I wonder where he is these days. I'm right here. We work together every day at the late show. Asked and answered. Let's go. We did not reach out ahead of time. We just rang the bell and a stranger let us up. Something we never would have done when we lived there. It's a long way up. I was a younger man then. I got to say, I think I blew out a knee. Hello. Hello. Hi. I'm Lainey. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. It's okay. I used to live here. Can I come in? No problem. Thanks. There was a club called Gazz Bowls that used to be there. It was the oldest liquor license in Chicago. And you could drink to what? Four o'clock in the morning? Four or five. We heard a lot of, I'm slashing your tires, Jimmy. Why don't you go off with Brenda? There was a lot of that in the middle of the night. The wall wasn't here. Right. And there's a lot less peeling paint. Back then it was an all-you-can-eat lead buffet. Oh yeah. Peeling off into our mouths while we slept. It was exciting to see the old apartment and remember the wild, freewheeling times I had here in my 20s. I spent a lot of time in this room worrying. I was surprised they were able to hose out the anxiety I had in this apartment. Just staring out this window going, how will I make rent? What have I done? Why didn't I go to law school? To continue the feeling of being in our 20s, it was time to start drinking in the afternoon. We headed to our old local, the old town alehouse. So you were here for how long? 11 years. We had no money when we lived here. So we had less than no money. All I knew was hot dogs. One night it was you and me and his girlfriend Amy and we were standing on the corner right over there. And we realized that we had no money to eat anything. So we took all the money that we had out of our pockets. The three of us. And I had these three seniors. And Amy snatched the three dollars out of my hand. She held her head and she goes, I can buy a lemon and chicken thighs. I have a bag of rice. I'll make this Avago Lemonosuit. When I did that night and I spent the nights in the morning, I can have leftovers. That's how little money we had. When I lived here, one of the things I loved is that this is the land of Lincoln. So you could pay for anything with pennies. The law was people had to accept pennies as payment. Still do. Still, really. Yeah, it still works. What are we owing for this? 18, please. 18 dollars. People want to just start counting them out. Oh yeah, I can do that. No problem. And here's your tip. Bacon's so much. More of the worst of the late show after this. Welcome back. If you're joining us, I'd be surprised. Considering what we're showing tonight. If you stuck around, if you watched the field piece thing we just did, where I was in Chicago, that piece that we showed right before the commercial break of my old age, Chicago, just found out, we showed the wrong one. That is not the edit we intended to show. But you know what, I believe that's in the spirit of worst of. And so we're just gonna let it roll. We're just gonna let it roll. I love it. The universe is conspiring for this thing to get worse and worse. Now, not everything in tonight's show is something we never aired. Some of it is stuff we did air and deeply regret. Specifically, one of our briefly reoccurring characters, Shreakin' Joe. Yay! Joe. Hey! Hey! Joe is a hard-living hard rock and hard rock cafe bathroom love-making Michigan sleaze guitarist who debuted on the late show in 2017 as a tribute to both Kid Rock and Ted Nugent. At the time, these fellas were both rumored to be running for U.S. Senate in Michigan. America first met Joe and learned his immortal catchphrase, Vongo Dongo, when he too announced a bid for Senate in Michigan. So, Shreakin' Joe, what's your message to the people of your state? The humor platform is simple. I want you to get wet, jump on it. I love sex. Let me hear you, Michigan. Yes! Yes! If you thought that was good TV, you are alone because here's an actual graph of the minute-by-minute ratings when Joe appeared on screen. Lot of technical info in there, but basically it breaks down to Shreakin' Joe plus TV equals bad. We thought, okay, maybe it was a fluke. So we had Shreakin' Joe on again to remote his American dumbass ice cream machine. And would you look at that? Nobody wanted seconds. Well, in the spirit of being the worst of, please welcome back to the late show one last time, Shreakin' Joe. Oh, God, no, brother! All right, Steve, how's it hangin'? Who you bangin'? Shreakin' Joe, welcome back to the show. Though I understand from your location that you've actually been living backstage here at the Ed Sullivan Theater the whole time. Yup, emphasis on the eater, am I right? Very subtle. Stuff like that might be why so many people turned off their TVs as soon as you came on screen. Did you see the ratings chart? Yup, that thing dropped faster than my pants at Barnes and Noble Ladies Night. Beat the Chargers, by the way. Turns out the H-Fract Shaft is a bit of a legal no-man's land. Well, congrats, Shreakin' Joe. Just wanted to read you this quote from Lauren Marcello, CBS Senior VP of Late Night Current Programs. She said, and I quote, I have been studying ratings on the show for the last decade, and I have never before seen them take such an absolute and utter nosedive within moments of a character coming out. Yeah, sorry Lauren, you know I feel bad about that, Steve. From the bottom of my heart to the top of my ding dong. I'm really gonna miss you, Joe. And I'm gonna miss your desk. Gotta find a new place to sleep. And other stuff, like stuff in others. Wait, are you saying you've been having sex on my show desk? Uh, no, you've been having show on my sex desk. Get this, that sex led to a lot of wonderful things, including my daughter. You have a daughter? Hey, you bet your type of this! Come on, let's go! Dungo! Dungo! Steve, meet my pride and joy, my baby girl, Shreakin' Jane. Buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh. Jane, well, well, Miss, it's a pleasure to meet you. Dad, you were right, this guy sucks! Oh, Steve's not so bad. He's got one hell of a sex desk. Shreakin' Joe and his daughter, Shreakin' Jane, everybody. Bongo, dongo! Bongo, dongo! If there's anyone still watching, we'll be right back. ["Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"] ["Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"] Welcome back! Yeah! Lewis? Yes? What are you doing after the show ends? Probably music. Yeah. Speaking of which, there are also some songs we wrote that never made it to air. Did someone say Michael Cruz Kane? No! No, no one said that. Well, I just said it. Everybody, it's my writer, Michael Cruz Kane. I think you want to come up here? Want to come up here? There you go. You want to do this? Do you want to come up here? Do you want to come up here? Yeah, sure, I guess, yeah, I went up. What's up? Well, Steve, I had heard that we were doing a worst-of show, okay? Yeah. Okay, okay. And I got very excited because I have a song pitch that you've never heard that has been rejected four times. So you pitched it four times, and the process goes to the head writers first. You've pitched it four times, and it got rejected every time. That's correct. Okay, why did you think our head writers and our producers never brought it to me? I don't like to speculate, but I think they're jealous. All right, let's hear it. Okay, so in Texarkana, there was a tornado, and it sucked up all this water, and it sucked up all the fish that were... That's an actual story that happened? Yeah! Real story, okay. In Texarkana, sucked up all the water, and the fish in the water, and then eventually the fish came raining back down. A tornado pulled fish out of a pond and rained it down on somebody. You got it. Okay, and when was this? Why do you ask? We try to engage in the national conversation on a daily basis. It has to be kind of current. Yeah, okay, well, at one point it absolutely was current. Then when was that? That would be the year 2021. So five years ago this happened? Just five, wow, okay, perfect, that's great. So it rained fish? Yes, and you know how there's a song called It's Raining Men? I do, it was a fun fact. It was actually written by Paul Schaefer, who was Letterman's band leader. Yes, okay, awesome. So I wrote a 30 second parody of It's Raining Men called It's Called It's Raining Fish. Okay, that's not so bad. Even better, every time I pitched it, got a little longer. So now it's three and a half minutes. You wanted me to sing a three and a half minute parody song about fish? Oh, you. You wanted to sing it? What? You want me. Michael Cruz Kane to sing it with you? Steven, if there are two microphones. There's two microphones right there. You're crazy. I am crazy. I had nothing to do with this, this is not my idea. Hit it. Okay. You want to do that dancers? We're all my fish lovers. Let me see you smile. Better get outside, girl. If you're an XBO file, it's the night for the first time. God's gonna grant your wish. For the first time in history, it's gonna start raining fish. It's raining fish. Utilapia. It's raining fish. Squish, squish. I got my coat on, whose would not go out? I can absolutely drenched in trout. It's raining fish. Bluefin tuna. It's raining fish. My favorite dish. Soul. Lounder. Macro. Hate. We know the names of lots of fish. God bless Mother Nature. She's a pescatarian. Tell them she gave us mahi mahi. And she gave us Atlantic salmon. Sea bass makes me happy. Group of maids will laugh. We love the little mermaid. But just her bottom half. Please welcome Paul Schaefer. All the fishes they are falling. Falling on my face. So get some bread and tomatoes. We'll make the Puglia bass. Cause tonight for the first time. God's gonna grant your wish. And for the first time in history, it's gonna start raining fish. It's raining fish. It's raining fish. Yeah, we cannot put that on the show. Paul Schaefer, everybody. Michael Cruz Kane. We'll be right back with more questionable entertainment. Welcome back, everybody. Bye, Lewis. Bye, band. Well, it's been a great night of showing you the worst of the late show. We never could have made all that terrible stuff, as well as some of the good stuff we showed you throughout the last 11 years, without the amazing people in the show. We're gonna have to do a little bit of a show and we'll be right back with more interesting stuff. We'll be right back with more interesting stuff. We'll be right back with more interesting stuff. We're gonna have to do a show throughout the last 11 years, without the amazing people in this room. This staff is so brilliant, so collaborative, so creative, and so kind. And before we go, we want to show you all of their names, put over the beautiful Never Before Seen opening credits for the late show that we made back in 2015, filmed in Tilt Shift photography by Argentinian director Fernando Livschitz. But before we do any of that, I just, Tom, I wrote something here. Just something nice. Just something nice to say about the people, if you don't mind, punching this up. Okay, folks, this is Tom Purcell. He... Tom is my executive producer and my showrunner. We've known each other since 1988. 1988? Probably. And if you like this show, I have something to do with that and the people in this room have a lot to do with that. But this guy has an enormous amount to do with that. And I don't just mean... I don't just mean the jokes. There's a lot of talented and funny people and the producers and the staff and the writers here. But this fella has been a constant and consistent hand to the helm since October of 2009 when you became my executive producer over at the Colbert Report. And I just want to give you... I want to give you a little something. This is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, um, this... These are called the Nightly Tom's. Oh, wow. Okay. Every night before the show, since 2009, these are the Nightly Tom's from the late show. Every night on a show night, this is the show the next day, Tom sends out what he thinks are going to be the big stories for tomorrow and some silly stories too. But what are the big stories for the...tomorrow. And every single story he sends out has at least one joke associated with it. And I want, and I just want to let you guys know the level of work this is, because that's only one volume of these. There's over 1800 of them in here. And I don't necessarily want to point that out for the bulk of it, but I want to give you guys some idea of the kind of work this fella's put in for the last 18 years. Here, here's what time did these get sent out? This one was sent out at 11.32 at night. That's when your work day ended. This one got sent out at 11.28. This one got sent out at 11.55. This one got sent out at 12.29 Eastern time. And I just, I didn't feel like I could do a best of show or a worst of show. And I know I couldn't have done any show without you for the last 18 years. And I just wanted everyone to know that this man right here, my brother, we met in 1988 in Chicago. And he is the heart behind my heart and the mind behind my mind. And I love you and thank you for all these years. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. That's it for the worst of the late show. These are for you. Thank you. Stay tuned for the rest of the week of our final three episodes. They'll be better than this. Good night. Thank you for listening to the Late Show Pod Show with Stephen Colbert. Just one more thing. If you want to see more of me, come to the Late Show YouTube channel for more clips and exclusive. From the trusted team behind 48 hours, welcome to Case by Case, your weekly update on the biggest true crime stories unfolding right now. Nick Ryder remains in custody without bail. Luigi Mangione accused of stalking and gunning down United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. From high-profile trials and stunning evidence to major breaks in cold cases, we'll follow it all, Case by Case. Follow and listen to 48 Hours, Case by Case, wherever you get your podcasts.
