Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist - Stephen Colbert on His Rise to Fame and Becoming a Cookbook Author (October 2024)

Episode Date: August 10, 2025

Willie Geist sits down with the host of "The Late Show", Stephen Colbert, to chat about Stephen's rise to fame and the pivotal moment he knew he would be able to make a career out of comedy. He also shares some of his favorite recipes from his cookbook, “Does This Taste Funny?” (Original broadcast date October 13, 2024) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another edition of the Sunday Sitdown podcast. My thanks, as always, for clicking and listening along. Got a good one for you this week with the host for nine more months anyway of the late show on CBS, Mr. Stephen Colbert. Now, Stephen and I got together well before, several months before, the surprise announcement he made on the air in July that CBS effectively had canceled his show. He's got to run through May of next year. A lot of people believe this is. mixed up in politics as Paramount, the parent company to CBS was seeking to close a massive media merger that needed approval of the Trump administration's FCC. Of course, Stephen Colbert has been a long and vocal critic of President Trump and his administration. So a lot of discussion about what was really behind this move. But as I say, Stephen and I sat down for this conversation well before that news around the release of a new cookbook with his wife Evie. Stephen, of course, took that job on the Late Show about a decade ago, 2015, after David Letterman announced his retirement from the Late Show. It was an elevation from the Colbert report in which Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central was playing a character,

kind of this cable news blowhard that he introduced on the Daily Show when he got that job in 1997. So gets to the Late Show and suddenly for the first time in his career actually has to play himself. It had been an improv actor before that. So Stephen and I talked about his life, his rise through comedy, born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, where he met his wife. Evie had tragedy in his life, as you'll hear about, a commercial plane crash that killed his father and two of his brothers, Stephen the youngest of 11 kids, a fascinating guy, a smart guy, a funny guy. So sit back, relax, and enjoy now a conversation with Stephen Colbert on the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Stephen, good to see you, man. Hi, Willie. I'm so happy to see you. Happy to have me on. I am. Yes.

I'm so happy for you that you have me on. I can see how you've put your guests at ease just with this sort of rapport, this repartee. You don't want to start with a handshake or anything. Oh, off the top? Yeah. Good to see you. Good to see you, too. The one for camera. Not the one that was off. So when I told people I was coming to interview you today, they said, oh, that's great.

Colbert, we're doing a little politics, little comments. I said, no, it's going to be mostly deviled eggs and shrimp paste. Hell yeah. And here we are. Tell me about the genesis of this cookbook. The need for food is the number one. I'm a carbon-based light form. And I have to feed the beast every day.

Evie and I, it's me and Ev. Yes. It's me and my lovely wife Evie there. We were, like everybody else, stuck in a house for COVID with our children. You know, you couldn't go out. to have somebody else cook your food at a restaurant. We were back in South Carolina to help take care of her folks,

which were right down the street from our place in South Carolina. We were there with the people who taught us how to cook when we were younger in the ingredients in the low country of South Carolina that were the basis of all of our cooking. And we started rediscovering all these old recipes, these family recipes.

And then somebody asked us to write a cookbook. We said, can I do it with Evie? Because it would be much more fun to do it. with her because I could make her do all the work and still put my photo on the front. Smart. Yep. Take the credit. Yeah. And most of the cash, I would have seen. Yeah. Yeah. So what is it, Stephen, about Charleston? Because for people who haven't been there, spent time there, it is a unique and wonderful, not just food town, but cultural town. What is it about Charleston that makes it so special? Charleston's something of a land that time forgot.

It, first of all, it's like a city under glass. Have you ever been? Oh, yeah. It's incredibly beautiful, incredibly obsessed with his own history, never wants anything to change. You know, like the Charleston joke about how many Charlestonians does it take to change a light bulb? Why would you change it? The old light bulb was fine. And the other joke is, one joke, the other joke is, how many Charlestonians does take to change the light bulb?

It's like, one person to change it, one person to say the old light bulb was better at 90 people to mix the drinks. That's my kind of town. Yeah, exactly. I don't know, it's a party town. It's a town that loves a good cocktail. It never misses cocktail hour. It's got incredible food right there in the water.

It's so on the water that it's kind of in the water, increasingly. Actually, sea walls notwithstanding. We both grew up catching our own fish, catching our own shrimp, catching our own crab, and then learning to cook it. It's one of the best culinary towns in the world. And when we were there, very quiet. Now it's very busy. Now there's a lot of tourists.

And I can understand why. Don't stop going. I understand. It's good for the economy. But when we were kids, I mean, I grew up on a dirt road on James Island, South Carolina, with dogs sleeping in the streets. Like, it was very, to calumaching the bird. And even when I was 13, we moved downtown, which is where Evie grew up. I rode my bike down the middle of the street. I rode my skateboard down the mill of the street.

There was no worry that anybody was going to hit me. There was just nobody there. There was nowhere to go in all day to get there, nothing to buy and nothing to buy it with. We were too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash. Those are all things that describe the Charleston of my youth. Sounds like a country song. Yeah, yeah.

So during COVID, we were all stuck at home like everybody was. And our eldest daughter, who at the time was 26 or 25 or something like that, She goes, I am not living at home with you as your child. This is going to be a roommate situation, and as such, I've made a chore wheel. And so one of the things, which was smart, because then we weren't, they weren't having to, like, resist our presence in the house. Right. But one of the things on the chore wheel was everybody cooks a different night. And so we all had to, like, oh, we had to rack our brains for all the different things that we knew.

And it was mostly local produce because you couldn't get anything at the grocery stores. You remember? At the beginning of COVID, you couldn't get a chicken leg. So we could. go catch fish, go get food from the produce stands and stuff like that. Evie's laughing at me as if that's all made up. That's not made up. Evie, is he making this up?

Okay, move on. You're embellishing. I'm making the story better. That's what authors do. So you caught all your own fish. Can we at least get her out of my line of sight? So as I'm lying to Willie Geist, she's not fact-checking me? On your own fish.

Thank you. Slaughtered your own animals. Farmed your own vegetables. A hundred percent. Clowed the field. Got it. Yeah, exactly. Shot the ducks.

Everything. Harvested the Morels from the forest. Go back to the original days of Charleston, South Carolina. Exactly. Just dove into the surf with a knife in my teeth and pulled out a sword fist. Just slaughtered it right on the beach, started cutting it up. It had a bucket. some limes and some cilantro and salt. By the time I got back to the house, it was Cevice.

That's how we lived during COVID. Oh my God. You don't understand. I think we got what we need here. Good. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm super into this book because you can tell I've bookmarked a bunch of pages. I love shrimp paste, which I understand was part of your first date. You made it wrong. Do you like the name shrimp paste? I like the name because I've never, it's so unappetized. It is. Shrimpaste. It's just ground up shrimp until they're a paste. Enjoy.

No, it's a big thing. It's shrimp paté. Right. It's really what it is. But the English, you know, the Charleston's so English. Like, it's so anglophile, which I forgive them for. But it's the simplest thing you can make. It's just shrimp and mayonnaise and onion.

And I managed to mess it up. The first thing I made for her, I went and bought canned shrimp. Oh, come on. Which was the real problem. So you should have fished them yourself. Just snatch them out of the water. Yeah. Like a great.

drizzly with a salmon like I do, like as manly southern men do. Do you, I know this is a really hard question because I marked a few, but do you have one or two favorites in here, like your go-to recipes? Red rice. Red rice is the thing that I would make more than anything else in this. Because growing up in South Carolina, I went to Stiles Point in elementary, this little public school on James Island, and everyday red rice, which the ladies there would cook up in barrels with paddles because they had to feed all these lousy kids.

And that recipe reminds me of the one I had when I was a kid. And it's half stolen from Alison Roman. Okay. She has a shallot pasta recipe where it's a lot of caramelized shallots and anchovies and red pepper. And I went to make it with her when she was on my show. And it's supposed to be over Bucatini pasta, which I'm morally opposed to. because Bucatini pasta is like a spaghetti that's got a hole in the middle. Yeah.

So you can't suck it in. Right. Because you go to like suck in that like you're sucking in a piece of spaghetti and you just end up breathing through a piece of pasta, which is kind of a bait and switch. And it's a you can't do Lady in the Tramp with it. Right. Right. If you and I were lady in the tramping with Bukitini right now, we would just be breathing each other's carbon dioxide and we'd eventually pass out. That's not romantic.

So in a way, so I saw that. You were more passionate about Bucatini than most people are about anything, and I respect that. Well, there are certain foods that steer you wrong. I want to get to the shrimp tails in a second. Can we talk about shrimp tails in a second? Oh, yeah, I've heard about your, I agree with you, by the way. I saw that jam that she made with shallots and tomato paste and, you know, and anchors and everything. I said, that would be great in a rice as a red rice. And you know who disagrees with me? Allison Roman. She doesn't think so. Oh, really? No, I'm going to have to send her some. Make her literally eat her work.

No Bucatini ever, under any circumstances. Friends don't let friends eat Bucatini. One of the reasons we wrote this book is that if this does nothing, if this book does nothing, let's spark a national conversation about whether shrimp should have their tails on them when they're served to you in a sauce. Then I've done my job. I mean, you are driving this message hard. I've watched some of your other interviews.

This is something that you believe in. you want to see change. You see a problem. You want to fix the problem. Do you not think it's a problem, Willie? I think they're totally unnecessary. Unnecessary or destructive? Because you go, you get like a beautiful, like, let's say you get a beautiful pasta that's got a red sauce in it.

It's got shrimp in there. Should there be tails on the show? No, of course not. Because why am I in the pasta with knife and fork? But you've watched that for years and never done anything about it. You've never taken a stand. You're like, that's somebody else's problem. Fine.

I'll have my staff take the shells off. The staff at the Today Show, remove your shells. See, that's your East Coast elitist not caring about the other people out there who don't have a deshelling staff. Now, let me throw a different shrimp format at you. Shrim cocktail serves as a little bit of a handle to get into the cocktail sauce. If you have to, you can leave the tail on a shrimp for shrimp cocktail. Because the illusion is you're getting less shrimp by not touching the shrimp. Right.

The shrimp meat with your fingers. But the tail is just as shimpy as the shrimp. Maybe even shimpier. It is. And then you've got that collection of fish tails on the plates. It just looks like you've loaded up some toenail clippings around the end of the edge of the bowl. Is that what you want? Are they little trophies up there?

I was supposed to mount these on a board in my den? Why do I have any part of an animal that I'm not eating on my plate? Have you taken? I don't want a huff on my burger. Willie? Do you? No. But again, you saw the problem and did nothing.

Have you seen any movement on this? You know what they said? All it is necessary for evil to succeed. is for good men to do nothing. And you sat idly by. Why are you blaming me for this? Because you're the one who admitted that you knew there was a problem and said nothing. You were silent.

Okay. Okay. I'm ashamed. I'm a coward. Consentieri. Okay. The maximum of the law is silence gives consent. That's what you did.

Do you not understand? Look in the mirror. Have you taken this to any chef's restaurateur? I have. I have given an earful. an eye full to Ina Garton. I was about to say I was giving earful to Ina Garton, but her name was Ina.

So I want to give an eye full to ear in a garden. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I've told I know. You got in her face about it. I got all up in her grill.

I believe it's how she described. And how did she respond? Is she with you? She apologized. She didn't apologize. No, she would never do that. Ina would never do that. She's the best.

Let's establish. Come on. 100%. She loves this book, too. And we stole a recipe from her, too. Borrowed, inspired by. or you want to just go with stall? All artists steal, genius.

All artists borrow geniuses steel. That's right. I forgot who said that. That's right. I think I did. Just called yourself a genius too. So that was good. I've been waiting all morning for you to do it.

I was getting panicky that nobody would. No one's chanting my name in here. My name isn't on a sign. There's no applause. It's a little quiet, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. I'm getting panicky. No affirmation yet today.

This book obviously is a lot about family too, right? inspired by your wife's mother, by your family, all the traditions in your house. We're really dedicated to my mother-in-law, Patty McGee, who was a fantastic hostess, like a real classic Southern hostess, and always not only good at it, but always ready for it, always up for it, always had a plate of cheese biscuits put out, always ready to bring somebody in for a glass of tea or something stronger. A cheese biscuit, hers, I can imagine, are perfection. It's delicate.

It's very hard to do a proper Southern cheese. biscuit. It should look like you're about to have like a pecan sandy or something like that. It should be like really nice and flaky and everything like that. But savory and spicy with like a little eggwash on top. She would make thousands of them and her family would distribute them around Charleston for her at Christmas time. It's the first thing I ever had from any McGee family member was I went to pick up Evie for our first date on December 26th, December 26th, 1990. 1990, December 26th, 1990, Feast of St. Stephen, if anyone out there is paying attention. And Evie was late.

She wasn't ready to come downstairs. And so her father said, well, can I get you, son? And I said, I'll take, well, I said, what do you have? Smart. Okay, because I didn't know, because this isn't a mature Southern man. And I can't ask him for, like, you know, I have a screaming orgasm. I have a slippery nipple. I'll have an Alabama slammer.

No, because I'm a kid. You're like in my 20s. Right. You know? And he said, I have bourbon and I have vodka. I'm like, all right. No nonsense. And I said, I knew I couldn't ask for a bourbon and ginger ale because that's kid stuff.

This is a mature southern man. So I said, I have a bourbon and something. And he goes, I have water and I have soda water. And I said, I will have soda water. And I was drinking that. And I believe your mother had brought out a tray of cheese biscuits it's whenever he walked in. So that, you associate that with one of the great moments in your life.

Pure pleasure. That's my favorite thing. It was a Christmas time. So for Christmas, for me, it's a bourbon and soda water and cheese biscuit. That's it. When you think about your household, your family, your parents, any of the foods in here, take you back? The other end of the meal, fudge. Fudge.

My mom was... And there's a competition, right? Well, it's not a competition. It's a disagreement. My mom, you know, mother of 11 kids. kids. She's very gracious, but she wasn't much of a cook because she was not taught to cook by her mother, and she didn't really have an opportunity to explore more than volume cooking. Right. And she started having children in 1945 and ended in 1964. We're perfectly the baby boom generation.

And this was the heyday of processed food. And I don't think my mother had a recipe that she didn't get off the back of like a bottle of jelly sauce or like a packet of Lipton soup or something like that, which is fine with us because who doesn't love the salt. And so she only had one recipe, I think, that was really her families. That actually got it from her mother and was a fudge recipe. And it's not like the fudge you would normally have. It's just not like vacation fudge that gets cut off a brick, that gummy stuff. Right. And I don't know why fudge is associated with vacations. I don't exactly what you meant. I don't understand. I don't understand why. Yes. But this is crisp.

This snaps. And it's super grainy. It's very specific. And you know you've got it right is that when you scratch it against your teeth, like when you scrape a little bit of it, you immediately think I have, I should see the dentist. That literally it just your teeth, your feelings just transmit a message. Right. Straight to a dental hygiena saying you got to. 100%.

You got to come in and do something about that. But my mom never wrote it down. And so there's a million versions. Everybody in the family has what they remember mom telling them. Like my mom, we went through so many old cookbooks to try to remember an old card catalogs to try to remember some of these old recipes. I love the old way of writing down recipes, which is things like a good amount of butter.

Yeah, yeah. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. A generous dollop of cream. What does that mean? Try writing a cookbook with the words like that. My mom's recipe with a fudge just said, How much butter?

Oh, about the size of a medium egg. Eggs come in medium? I didn't realize that. Very average chickens gave these eggs. So anyways, that was it. But in my mind, I'm always thinking, I guess that's between, that's not quite a jumbo. Right. Yeah.

And yours came out the best? Is there a consensus about that in the family? There is a definitive, no, there's no consensus. There's only one recipe in the book. There's five recipes. I did not proclaim myself the champion. I did not proclaim myself the champion of the book. Anyone who makes these recipes declares my recipe the correct one.

Isn't that right? Didn't I? Yes, they're telling me I'm right. The people who work for me say I'm right. I don't have people to take my shrimp tails off from you, Willie, but I do have people to stand around and go. You're right, Chief. That's right.

That was funny. Hey, funny with his name on the building. Still got it. And look where it's gotten you. Yep. Having people yell how great you are. To the Today Show with Willie Geist. We did it.

Yep. You did it. I love working for NBC. It's good to steal you for a few minutes. I got to tell you. Not at all. Not at all. It is.

Big fan of the peacock. Yeah. It's good, right? Do good stuff over there. It's good. We do good stuff over there. I'm a fan. I'm not being facetious.

Yeah? Okay. I was waiting for that without that was the setup. Nope. No setup. Hey guys, thanks for listening to the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Stick around to hear more from Stephen Colbert right after the break.

Welcome back now more of my conversation with Stephen Colbert. So the title of book is Does This Taste Funny, which is very clever. And we're talking about... Thank you. You know, I worked for Clever Central for many years. I used to work at Clever Clubs. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

You've thrived in the world of cleverness. There's nothing more damning you can say in a pitch. Like if your writers are pitching you jokes at the beginning of the day, and someone has this elaborate pitch. And it just got like, that's very clever. Meaning that had a lot of pieces to it, but it never got to a joke. I was so complicated. That must have taken you so long to say that much without ever going to do a punchline.

It was very clever of you to do that. So thank you. I think the title qualifies as clever. Does this taste clever? Never been so insulted in my life. I can't believe I just said nice things about NBC. I know. You come at me with that's very clever.

I had to get us back to the level here. Thank you very much. So talking about family. Yeah. And recipes and all that. Yes. Big family. 11 kids.

11 kids, yes. So where does comedy come in? I've heard from a lot of kids from big families, whether it's Conan or somebody else, where it's just like, I got to get noticed somehow. Conan claims he has a big family. How many kids are not next to you? How many kids are the family? Is it sick? Something like that.

What about half years? It's a Brady bunch. That's nothing. You couldn't run a farm with that many kids. You couldn't harvest potatoes back on the old sod. with only six kids. A big family. A full football team.

Yeah. Full football team. Exactly. Same thing as Bobby and Eunice. Like entities. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Eleven kids. 11 kids. Yeah. So where does the comedy come in for you? Well, what in your life? I'm the youngest of 11. It's not just 11 brothers and sisters. I'm the youngest of 11.

And my sisters, who are all older than I am, my sisters said there was remarkable that I ever learned to walk because they carried me everywhere. So I always had an audience. And, you know, comedy was, you know, was a humorocracy. Like, whoever the funniest person was in the room at the moment was the king. And as a kid, my brothers and sister would say, like, I was very quiet because I was just watching them to see, like, what, well, I just thought they were the greatest. I thought they were the funniest. I still think they're the funniest people in the world. Evie says, to this day, when I get together brothers and sisters, I get really quiet because they just want to watch, they're just so funny to me. Are you fact checking me on that one too? You did.

say that. Okay. But that dynamic is still there. Yeah, I just think they're incredibly funny. And I learned a lot from them. Like my brother Billy, who's no longer with us, unfortunately, though his beer brisket is in this book, is that he, as a kid, he made me watch W.C. Fields or kept me up to watch WC. Fields and the Marks brothers and taught me like, you know, guy walks into a bar kind of

jokes. Yeah. Stuff like that. So if I asked your siblings. Who the funniest one in the family was? Well, what would they say? That's a good question, by the way. I don't know.

Not you? Maybe Jim? I don't know. Maybe Mary. Maybe Marco. I don't know. Who would they say is the funniest one in the family, love? Mary.

Mary. My sister Mary. Yeah. Yeah. Would they have seen your life as a comedian from what they saw of you as a kid? In other words, they go, yeah, of course. That's what Stephen did. Attention, needing attention, I think.

It needs those applause. Eager for a validation. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So where did you first find the stage? Where did you... I first found the stage in high school as a class clown.

I went to a very kind of clicky school in South Carolina. And me and my closest friends were kind of on the outskirts of the society of the high school. You know, out way, way past Pluto in the solar system. We were out in the orc cloud of our high school. And making people laugh was the first thing they got me invited to parties. It works. It does. It does.

Yeah. Personality actually works, it turns out. I don't know. Sure. I made the football team laugh. Well, that's what I mean. That made the football team laugh. Yeah.

And it stopped them from beating me up. That helps too. That was, yeah. Keeps you safe. Slow down their punch. Just the laughing. Slow down the swings. Give you just enough time to get out of the way.

Just to dodge, exactly. Were their actual performance? formance as though were you at that point were you in the plays no i wasn't no i didn't know i didn't i was i don't know i was a little afraid to audition for anything it wasn't until i was a junior i did my sister irene or maybe it was a senior in high school i did my sister irene george coffman said my sister i mean i played a brazilian admiral my first line was ghost of the new york i like new york but the punch line was now ghost of the brooklyn which is i don't like brooklyn which is the other had. You've got to laugh every night. He killed me. That guy. I wanted it. Where's he now, right?

I don't know. Where's Jono now? I'm sure you're doing great, Johnno. Yeah, no, he's good. And so I kind of got, that was fun. I had the bug doing that. But really where it changed for me is that I, I went to theater school. I went to Northwestern University to the theater program there, because I was going to be an actor, Willie. Yes. An actor, not just play Hamlet, but to be Hamlet, and to be actively miserable at you. Can't you see my depression, aren't I entertaining? To be gloomy around. And then while I was being all professionally gloomy

or training to be a professional gloomy person with a beard and I wore a lot of black. Kind of like this. I wore a lot of black. I had a beard. I was a poet slash jerk. And, you know, sad at people. One of those guys.

And I wore eyeliner. And briefly, briefly, were eyeliner. What? You almost got it. A little bit, a little bit. I didn't need makeup. I was pale enough. And a friend of mine said,

hey, there's this thing downtown in Chicago called the Herald Improv. Del Cloce, Sean Halpern, the Improv Olympic. Do you want to go see it? So I went to go see these improvised one-act plays called the Harold Improv. And I fell in love immediately. And I said, I don't know what they're doing.

I have to do that. And it's not just because I was too lazy to memorize lines. I really, really wanted to get on stage. And the people I saw, Dave Pasquoisi, one of the people, who's one of the greatest improvisers in the world, he was on stage. And I just wanted to, I wanted to do that desperately. And so I started doing that on a weekly basis. I'd go down on Wednesdays and I would do a set with some friends in mind. This is while you're at Northwest.

While I was at Northwesterned, while I was studying all the like, me, ma, me, me, we're doing all that. She skis, he's, he's, leave beneath the ceiling of stars. Martha and Margaret walked arm and arm to the Charming Park, not far from their father's house. Still got it. No, oh, my God. My Lesac teacher would be so mad at me right now. I don't have the Y buzz. But I was doing that.

Then I was actually, you know, quote-unquote gigging, you know. Right. I don't think we got paid. I think we got free beer, which was great. That's great. To go do that on Wednesday nights. And then that kind of set a hook in me. And then I never wanted to walk away from improv.

And that jumps right into Second City after Northwestern. Well, kind of like I was, Second City was kind of wasn't the thing. Second City wasn't pure improv back in the day. We were kind of looked down in Second City because they got paid. They got paid. and they were sold out every night, and they seemed to be having a good time, you know? They were going to work on SNL.

Exactly. And so, but a friend of mine was the box office manager. And I went and traveled around for a while when I came back to Chicago, was sleeping on her friend's floor, had no money. And she said, hey, you can just work in the box office. I need somebody to cover. Jeff Garland was actually the person I replaced. Really?

Jeff Garland had been the guy before me. Oh, wow. And he was terrible. It was terrible. There would be a flashing light of like 20 people trying to get tickets because Second City was always sold out, and he would pick up the phone and he would go, hey, look at this. And he would go, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and he would clear the entire board and hang it up and watch it fell up again.

That's the kind of worker he was. Oh, Captain Potato Pants. And so he quit and I took his place at Second City in the box office. And then I found out that you could take classes there for free. And so I went, well, I want to keep sharp. I want to like, you know, I'm not in acting school anymore. I'm not certainly not getting hired by anybody. I could not get hired by anybody, Willie.

I was so gainfully unemployed for so many years. You'll never find old tape of me when I was a young actor doing something embarrassing because they wouldn't even hire me for embarrassing projects. So as a result, I had to write all my own stuff. Like me and some friends, like Dex Bullard and a couple friends of mine, we would get spaces and write our own shows and put them up and call the press and do it for like one weekend or two. And then we'd usually on somebody else's set, like they were building for something else.

We would just say, we'll split the box office with you. if you just let us use the set you're building for our set, and we would make up a show that would fit on their set, just anything to be on stage. And after I did that for a few years, working in the box office, I got invited to audition for Second City, and here I am talking to Willie Geist. There it is, direct line.

Well, 100% though, but there is a direct line. Yeah, of course. Were there time, Stephen? You said, you know, nobody would hire you. You couldn't get gigs. You were writing for other people, not the things you dreamed about doing. People would stop me and the street dogs would bark at me,

children would run from me. I was ugly and I smelled bad. Yes, that period of time, let's go back there. How long can we go? Were there times along the way there when you said, oh, maybe this isn't the thing for me long term? Or like, I should go to law school or something.

Every day, no, really crisis. Right after I got married, right after I got married, I thought, oh, what have I done with my life? Like, I kind of want to have a family in some sort of normative life. Right. And I have at the time I have what, I think, you know, charitably called a nervous breakdown.

And I, like my skin's on fire and I cannot sleep. And we're just married and poor Evie. She goes to work because she's working during the day like humans do. And I'm coming home about to go on stage at Second City. And I've got a great gig. I'm at the main stage at Second City. Like people would kill to be on that stage. But I'm walking in circles around the floating couch.

in our living room. She'd come home and says, how is your day? I'm like, you're looking at it. I will have walked around the couch all day thinking, oh my God, what have I done with my life? I'll never, like, be able to afford a home. I'll never, I'm an improviser.

Like, that is not associated with, like, the most stable life. It's hard to get a mortgage when you're an improv. Improv. How are you going to pay me? I'll figure it out. And so that went on, that was terrible. That actually went on for a couple months of like just, I would just,

curl in a ball. I'd go to the second city. I'd curl on a ball, lie down backstage, wait for my cue line, uncurl, you know. I'd uncurl from, you know, that couch, like the alien, you know, at the end when Ripley's on the escape pod with them. And then I would go on stage, but I felt fine when I was on stage. Yeah. And then that went on for months until one morning I woke up and I realized I felt fine and I couldn't remember why I would be feeling fine until I realized, oh, we're starting a new show. We're going to go and start writing a new show. And I went, oh, thank God, there's a thing that makes me feel better. But then I thought, oh, no.

So this is what I'm like when I'm not creating something new. So I've never stopped, like, creating from that moment. Because I don't think I would fall back into Slough of Despond again if I wasn't, like, creating on a daily basis. But I know that that's my Xanax, is to also Xanax. If anybody's got any, if anybody brought enough to share, I don't have a prescription right now. But that's what it does for me.

Actually, writing jokes with my friends is the thing that keeps me off the antidepressants. So then what's the gig, Stephen, where you go, okay, I'm going to be all right. This is a steady job. I think I can make a life out of comedy and I won't have to circle the couch when I'm not creating. I mean, kind of the Colbertaport. I was 41. Yeah. The Colbert Report.

Yeah. I had done it for a while. I was like, I didn't like, this did not hit me as a child. It had not become successful. I did not burst onto the scene, you know, like Athena from Zeus's head. I did this for 20 years before I got trusted with anything big. I mean, I certainly love doing The Daily Show for the years that I got to do with John before I moved over. But that was still, you know, somebody else's gig, and I was kind of part-time there.

I wasn't always on. And as much as I loved it. And then the, I remember it looked like the Colbertaport was going to go. like it was going to last and I was like this might go for a few years. I remember saying to Evie one night, I can't, I can't believe how lucky I am. Not only do I am I doing this thing that I love, but I get to do it in the place that I love. I got to do it in New York. I've made my career in New York, which to me was the ultimate goal, not just to have a career, but to have one in New York. And I have family in Los Angeles and,

you know, it can be a lovely place to go to, but I would resisted the mothership, the pull, the tractor beam that is just the size of the industry out there, I'd resisted for many years. And the fact that I got to do what I wanted and do where I wanted it felt like the greatest game of GoFish ever got what I wanted. And for people watching right now going through that, that was about 25 years since you started out that you got to a point where you said, well, by the time you were like mid-bearer of where you went, okay, I'm a little comfortable or have some stability. Yeah, it was clearly 23 or 24 years before I went, okay, yeah, I think I'm going to be okay.

And you stayed with it all that time. Well, I didn't know what else to do. No, but I didn't have nothing to do. People asked me what I would do if I didn't do this. I said, I think I'd be doing time. I have no other skills. I have nothing to offer the world, Willie, other than stupidity with a straight face. That's it.

A guy who looks like he's a lawyer, but acts like he's recently been on release. You read as someone who has other skills. And yet, you don't. That's the false lead of Stephen Colbert. He looks capable. We hired him because he looked responsible. That's actually how I got a job, but I worked for GMA for a while. I know.

Hello, friends. I know for the GMA. Now, what were you doing there? Now, I worked for all three shows. There you go. Exactly. You're pitching pieces to them. I worked for the Dana Carvey show, so I served for Carvey.

And at the time, and I don't know why, you may know why, but GMA used to be on the entertainment side of ABC, not the news side. Right. And in 1996 or seven or something like that, they switched from being entertainment to news. And as they were handing over the keys and about to weld the door shut between news and entertainment, somebody goes, oh, before we totally closed this door between news and entertainment, do you guys know anybody over there in entertainment on ABC who looks really straight but can be funny, like in a news way? And they said, ask Stephen Colbert. I don't know why they said that because I hadn't done any of this stuff yet.

but I got called in and I met with, I don't know, I think, Roon Island or someone, I met like the head of news over there, whoever was the head in 96 or 97. And they're like, what would you do if we sent you on a field piece? And I said, I assumed there'd be like some research packet. And they said, yeah, yeah. I said, I would get with my producer. Yeah, you'd get with the producer.

I'd read the research packet and we'd come up with questions. And then we'd go shoot it. And I assume someone would edit it and I'd be involved in like, voiceovers or something like that and then hopefully it will be good and they looked each other they went okay i think you understand me i think you understand what's going on here um do you know why they wanted me why because you guys in nbc at the today show had added a window whenever you guys added a window is when they called me because they literally said that window is killing us because they've got a window on the world we don't have a window on the world we want you

to be our window on the world. Oh, okay. And what they wanted me to be is funny the way a local weatherman is funny. I pitched 25 stories in a row. Nothing wrong with local weathermen. I love you. 100% weather on the ones. But take an umbrella.

Pack your patience. We got an Alberta clipper out there at night. Okay. Yeah. Well, we've got a heat dome also at the same time. Yeah. Yeah, it's an inversion layer. Exactly.

It was a stationary system. So they said, we want you to be the window. And so I pitched 25 pieces in a row, and they said no to 24 of them. Wow. So you got one on the air. I got one on the air. And that was it. Yes.

It was the Rube Goldberg National Competition. Yes. And were you happy with the piece? Were they happy with the piece? No one was happy. No one was happy. Hence that's. And right after that, my manager, James Baby Doll Dixon, said, the great, the

great, the one, the only. to accept no substitutes. He said, why don't you go meet these people over at the Daily Show? They're looking for people. I'm like, oh, what is this show? Why do I? Oh, my God.

I was just working for Dana Carvey. Now, is this cable access? Where am I going? What is this? Like, oh, you like them. You meet them. And I went over there, and they said, what are you doing right now?

And I said, well, I was on a Carvey show. I was the second city of the Carvey show. I wrote for SNL for a month. And now I'm a correspondent for Good Morning America. ABC News, which was their motto back then. I know. I'm a company man, no matter where I am.

Wherever. Or stick around for set. So, and I said, this is what I do. And I said, you're genetically engineered to do this job. Like, you were grown in a lab to be the Daily Show. And I said, okay. And then my first note I got over there was that I was too jokey. Oh.

That was too jokey. Too jokey at Comedy Central? I was too jokey at Comedy Central. So I apologized and tried to joke not so much. Yeah. And then I left to The Strangles with Candy. And when I came back, there was a new host. And this was John Stewart. And that changed everything. It did. He got you.

Changed the orbit of the planet. It changed the rotation of the Earth on its axis. You know how Superman goes backwards and lowest line to save? That's what John did for comedy. He's the first season. He's one who told me that. He's the first. He's humble and publicly. But in private, he goes, you know that Superman thing? That's me.

That's me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's not going to mind that I told it. Stick around for more of my conversation with Stephen Colbert right after a quick break. Welcome back now to the rest of my conversation with Stephen Colbert. No, I could talk to you all day, but you have to go do a show. So let's talk about that job up the street. Letterman steps down in 2014. They announce you as the new host.

Yes. Come out in September of 2015. Yes. The curtain goes up. Yes. There you are at the Ed Sullivan Theater. As myself. As well yourself.

That was I. Who the hell is that? Right. Who the hell is that? That's what I was going to ask. You've never played yourself until that day. I've always been acting up until that moment. Right.

Yeah. Suddenly that was me. So was that terrifying? I'm not a huge fan of me, it turns out. All I knew about me was that I was Evie's husband. And so every night we had Evie someplace I could see her in the fifth seat back on the row, on the audience left, stage right over here. And so I could look at her and go, all right, that's who I am. I'm her husband.

That helped a lot. lot. Not enough, but it helped a lot. It helped eventually. About eight months later, I went, oh, yeah, I know what I want to do here. Jokes. But what were those early months like when people were not quite sure what he's, no, he's not the guy from the Colbert Report.

Well, I didn't know either. I didn't know either. I was unsure what I wanted to do. I was determined not to do a monologue. That was one of the first things. And John Stewart was like, so you want to like completely change the form? Like, why did you take this job? I'm like, I wanted to make something new.

And he was like, but it's not do it your own. way, do your own monologue. It will be new because it'll be you. Right. And I eventually believed him. And now I wish I could do a 25-minute monologue every night. Yeah. Because that's it. That's what I love more than anything else. Right. I mean, I like talking to your world leaders, you know, yeah. Talk to Trudeau last night. Janet Yellen tonight, right? No, she's got the vid. She's got the Vid. She's got the Rona. She got the Rona. Yeah. So she can't come. But that's what's great about your show. You'll do big movie star. and capital official.

So we moved up your Kate Winslet. She moved up, Kate Winslet. They're very similar Yellen and Winslet. Audience won't notice. She would also not have let Jack up on the door. But she'd have stats. She'd have stats. She'd have reasons for it.

Now that you mention it, Kate Winslet solved that riddle on your show. She got up on my desk with me, and we fit perfectly. It was fine. And that ended the discussion. Sure. That's it. Yeah.

It makes Rose kind of bloodthirsty, you know, kind of out for herself. Yeah. And she was. Yeah. Poor Leo. She holds the heart of the sea for our entire life and goes, I'm going to die. Nobody gets it. That's what she said.

She had it for 90 years. But after me, la deluge. She didn't care. All those people spent all that money, gave her a great story, got to see, you know, got to relive those things and she doesn't give them the heart of the ocean. So Rose, in your telling, is the villain of Titanic. Yes. Yes.

This is an innocent boy who was seduced by an upper-class girl and then murdered. And the open ocean. Yeah. And then you throw in the jewel. Yeah. She came off, she got out of this great is all I know. She got married. She had a family.

She has a granddaughter. She rode horses. She flew planes from what we saw from in those photos. She lives to be a ripe old age. Has the jewel of the ocean the entire time and then throws it away. she's the hero? How is she the hero? I think you need to revisit that tonight.

I don't want to tell you how to do your job. She knows how I feel. She knows. She knows how I feel. Yeah. Have you interviewed Justin Trudeau, by the way? I have. Yeah. He's been a morning, Joe.

Unbelievable. I got to keep one eye closed and then blink this one alive. So one of my retinas survives. This is good-looking man. Yesterday I interviewed Justin Hartley from Tracker. Sure. Tracker. He'll find out when it.

is. I think it's Sundays. We'll drop that in later. You put a little... You put a snipe down here for Tracker? NBC will put an ad for Tracker up. You called for it. We'll drop it in. It's the number one show across all broadcast. More Americans watch CBS. More Americans watch Tracker than any other news source. Which is a little bit like GMA's old tagline.

Sure. Yeah. Something like that. But anyway, I interviewed two Justin's yesterday, two sexy Justins. And that's the privilege of these shows. I got Justin Hartley, who plays Coulter Shaw. I don't need to tell you on on Tracker. And then Justin Trudeau. And because I'm a gentleman, I'm not going to say which one is sex here. Yeah, I was going to ask you what I know. You're a gentleman.

You can answer. Also, company, man. Because of the loss of your dad and your brothers, you have become a very powerful voice for a lot of people around the world about grief and loss. I'm thinking about your interview with Anderson Cooper, which I watched again this morning and brought me to tears again this morning. The one on his show or the podcast? On his show. where he asked you about, you know, the punishment of God and how you could feel lucky in some way, and you explained it so beautifully. Are you happy to be that person in some ways in the culture where you can give voice to that feeling that so many people have?

I wouldn't say I'm happy, you know, to be associated with grief. but I am grateful, A. and Anderson for his projects that he's done addressing this, because it's a resource that people desperately need. We don't talk about grief in our culture. We don't have the tools anymore to talk much about it. We don't have, you know, we don't have formalized modes of expressing our grief that lets everybody know what we're going through,

even if they don't know the circumstances. You used to know someone wearing black for a year or something, or availed. They were in a state of grief. So I really admire what he's doing as a gift to people who don't know where to go for examples of surviving grief. I'm grateful if what my experience has been is useful to other people. When people say that to me, like they saw the interview with Anderson or any other times I've spoken about it with some of my guests, is that when they say that they're grateful, I always say, I'm sorry that you needed it. But I'm glad that my experience in some ways meaningful to you and gives you some hope that there is a spiritual nourishment that can come from accepting your grief and the circumstances of your life.

And it can give you a way to look at it that doesn't undermine you, but gives you a foundation on which to build, that acceptance, that seeing the world for all. It's cruel and radiant beauty. And that combination of both the cruelty of loss, but the radiant beauty of the world in the face, in spite of that loss, is this extraordinary, ecstatic tension that I think can, A, is very moving to experience, but also can sustain you through any dark days ahead, to know that someone else has gone through it,

and that you've used that wisdom to survive your own crises. So, as I said to Anderson, I wish more than anything else that the most tragic events of my life had not happened, as anyone would. But I have found the only healthy response to that. I learned, I realized that my healthy response to that, given to me by my mother, who, through her faith, accepted the reality of her situation and still loved God, that there is a very healthy response to that, given to be by my mother, who, through her faith, accepted the reality of her situation and still loved God, that there, is a way to learn and grow and love other people, especially in their suffering, because of that experience. So that's where the gratitude comes from. How long did it take you to get to that place? That wisdom. I mean, you're a little boy. I was 10 when my father and my brothers died in that plane crash in September 11th, 1974. I don't know. I might have been between 36 and 40.

Yeah. Because before I started the Colbert Report, I had already sort of come to grips with that or had a realization that there is some value that I had not realized that informed my view of the world that had to do with that. And so I can both wish that it didn't happen and also be grateful for the connection it gave me to other people because it happened. So 26, 27, 28 years. As I said to Anderson, I'm kind of hesitant to tell this story. more than once because it sounds like I'm saying like, oh, it's going to be fine. Just 30 years, just 30 years of suffering and you're going to be fine. You know, everybody can do it at their own speed.

But it took me that long to come to that realization. But I do think you were talking about this and that conversation in particular opened people's minds to another way of thinking about it. It did for me, actually. We go, no, that's right. I've enjoyed some form of community with people I otherwise would not have and maybe been able to help them in some way. They've helped me. And perceived in other people the truth that they carry with them all the time but don't express because they think that there is no one who understands it, no audience who wants to hear it. Some people think that grief itself is contagious so they don't want to hear it or even address it.

When in fact talking about it is the opposite of you don't go deeper necessarily into your grief when you talk about it. It turns what is a cave into a tunnel. You can actually see light at the other end. If you can talk about it, it brings it. you back out of the darkness. It doesn't, it doesn't shroud you in it. It's sort of paradoxical how addressing it doesn't make it darker. It actually opens the light. Well said. Thanks, man. Thank you. Thank you. Nice to talk to you too. Really enjoyed it. My big thanks again to Stephen and Evie for a great conversation. You can get their

cookbook, Does This Taste Funny? Recipes our family loves wherever you buy your book. And my thanks to all of you for listening again this week. If you want to hear more of my conversations with our guests every week, be sure to click follow so you never miss an episode. And don't forget to tune in to Sunday today every weekend on NBC to see these interviews in vivid, peacock color, your own two eyes. I'm Willie Geist. We'll see you right back here next week on the Sunday Sit Down podcast.