Fresh from announcing the cancellation of his show last week, late-night host Stephen Colbert was joined by a star-studded line-up of celebrity guests to spoof the network on Monday.
Colbert revealed last week that CBS would be axing The Late Show from May 2026, a move the network said was “purely a financial decision” but which came just days after its parent company Paramount agreed to pay $16m to Donald Trump after he complained that a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year was manipulatively edited.
On Monday’s show, the host addressed the situation by saying: “Some people see this show going away as a sign of something truly dire… We here at The Late Show never saw our job as changing anything other than how you felt at the end of the day.
“Or rather, changing how you felt the next morning, when you watched on your phone, which is why broadcast TV is dying – you’re part of the problem, look in the mirror.
“Point is, I don’t want this show to be associated with making you sad or anxious. So I thought: music, OK? That makes people happy, right? So instead of me talking, here with a song to cheer you up are two musical greats.”
He duly welcomed on stage “Weird Al” Yankovic and Broadway star Lin-Manuel Miranda to perform Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida,” setting up a parody of the viral video that exposed an affair between a tech company CEO and his head of HR after they were caught embracing on the jumbotron during the band’s gig in Boston last week.
Yankovic and Miranda broke off their performance to draw attention to the studio audience, prompting the camera to roam around the Ed Sullivan Theater and pick out the likes of Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen sitting together, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers sharing a beer, Adam Sandler and Christopher McDonald eating popcorn shrimp and John Oliver and Jon Stewart waving wildly.
The camera finally landed on an animated cartoon version of Trump hugging the Paramount logo before the pair awkwardly separated on realizing they were being watched, just as Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot had in the viral “kiss cam” video.
Colbert then hurriedly read aloud a corporate memo ordering Yankovic and Miranda to end their performance, saying the call was strictly a “financial” decision that had already cost the network “$40 million to $50 million.”
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The host also addressed the cancellation in his opening monologue, by saying: “It sunk in over the weekend that they’re killing off our show… but they made one mistake, they left me alive. Now, for the next 10 months, the gloves are off.”
He went on to read aloud a Truth Social post from Trump in which he wrote: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. He has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.”
Colbert responded: “How dare you, sir? Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism?” He then turned to the studio’s “Eloquence Cam” and said simply: “Go f*** yourself.”
On Trump’s comment that Kimmel was “next,” Colbert said: “Nope, no, no. Absolutely not. Kimmel, I am the martyr. There’s only room for one on this cross.”
He went on to make good on his promise that the gloves are off by commenting in reference to the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein furore: “The only other story out there, it’s kind of a small one. The president was buddies with a pedophile.”
