Stephen Colbert kicked off his final week of The Late Show with a salute to his graphics team.
During Monday’s episode, Colbert welcomed out the head of his arts department, Andro Buneta, to go through some of the best graphics that never made it to air — including one about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“Every day at The Late Show, our graphics team churns out hundreds of premium visuals projected onto your TV screens,” the host said, “and every single day I throw about half of them in the garbage.”
In a segment called “Graphics Graveyard” — named after the team’s group chat — Colbert revisited some of the jokes that were cut over the years.
“This was the darkest version of the graphics graveyard,” he said, pointing to an image prepared in celebration of Clinton winning the 2016 election to become the 45th president. Instead, Donald Trump defeated Clinton to succeed Barack Obama.
As the audience groaned, Colbert teasingly quipped: “Oh, grow up! It all worked out fine.”
Some of the other humorous graphics that were never aired included an edited version of Martha Stewart’s now-defunct Living magazine cover with the headline, “Donner or Dinner Party,” as well as a spoof pornographic magazine titled Gibblets featuring a turkey in a bra.
“When a mock-up got cut, we would print it out and put it up on the wall,” Buneta explained. “And then once we got Slack, we made a ‘graphics graveyard’ channel so that everybody could enjoy.”
CBS’s long-running Late Show franchise will come to an end Thursday. The network announced its cancellation last July, just days after Colbert criticized the network’s parent company, Paramount, for reaching a $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump over accusations that its newsmagazine series 60 Minutes deceptively edited a 2024 interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
While CBS has maintained that the decision was purely “financial,” the timing led numerous politicians and celebrities to suggest that it was politically motivated.
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Colbert himself was caught off guard by the cancellation, telling The New York Times last month that CBS had initially encouraged him to sign a five-year contract in 2023.
“I do not dispute their rationale. I do make jokes about it,” he clarified. “But I also completely understand why people would say (A) that doesn’t make sense to me and (B) that seems fishy to me, because the network did it to themselves by bending the knee to the Trump administration over a $20 billion, settled for $16 million, completely frivolous lawsuit.”
He acknowledged that “it’s possible that two things can be true. Broadcast can be in trouble. They cannot monetize because of things like YouTube, because of the competition of streaming. They’ve got the books, and I do not have any desire to debate them over what they say their business model is and how it does not work for them anymore.
“But less than two years before they called to say it’s over, they were very eager for me to be signed for a long time,” he added. “So, something changed.”
