Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert just sat down together to reflect on the situations they both faced with their respective late night shows.
For those unversed, Colbert’s show The Late Show ended up canceled by CBS, whereas Kimmel’s show Jimmy Kimmel Live suffered a suspension.
Now, with the suspension lifted, Colbert arrived at the Jimmy Kimmel Live stage and recounted his own experience with the cancelation and how he navigated the whole thing.
““Evie said, ‘Are you going to tell your staff tomorrow?’” Colbert recalled his manager James Dixon asking him after delivering news of the cancelation.
At the time, “I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I will tell them after the summer break. Maybe I’ll tell them in September.’ She said, ‘You’re going to tell them tomorrow.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. I just don’t think I’m up for it.’ And then she goes, ‘I am coming to work with you tomorrow because I think you are telling your staff.’”
On the day he recounts how “we get into the building. I go up in the elevator. I walk through the offices. By the time I get to my offices, I have sweat through my shirt. Because I didn’t want to know anything my staff didn’t know.”
At one point he decided to tell them, after they taped an episode instead and admitted, “I was so nervous about doing it right. Because there was nothing on the prompter, I was doing it off the cuff. I f***** up twice and I had to restart. And the audience thought it was a bit. They started going, ‘You can do it. Come on, Steve. You can do it’.”
“Because I always messed up on the sentence that told them what was happening. And then I got to the sentence that told them what was happening and they didn’t laugh. They didn’t laugh. That is it. So that’s how I did it.”
