The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is ending after nearly eleven years, which has us all pretty depressed. Not just because we’ve loved Colbert since his Comedy Central days, but for what the cancellation of his show implies on a larger scale. But as great as Colbert was in his late-night run, even he acknowledges that some jokes flopped, or were simply ill-timed. On one of the last episodes of CBS’s The Late Show, Colbert put together a few of these “Worst of the Late Show” bits, which he’s showing off now. But were they really that bad? Watch the video below and judge for yourself.
One of the gags goes back to 2016, only a year after the show began. Back to election night, specifically. With everyone on staff believing that Hillary Clinton was winning the election, they wrote the words “I’m With Her” across the exposed butt cheeks of several young men at a urinal. Well, for obvious reasons, Colbert scrapped that joke. Although we got a (blurred out) look at how that was going to look. Another joke wasn’t quite as naked, but a fake commercial for “erotic body gravy,” meant to air around Thanksgiving. Colbert realized the models were just too hot, and the joke doesn’t work if the actors are actually sexy.
Even the “worst” Stephen Colbert bits are usually funnier than some other late-night hosts’ best attempts at humor. We’re not naming names here. (But no, we don’t mean Jimmy Kimmel. Do the math.) We know that Colbert will soon be making a Lord of the Rings film in the next few years with Peter Jackson, but we hope that eventually, he lands back on late-night television as a host. This is really where he belongs, and no one in the modern TV era does it quite like him.